Wesnoth Summer Art Scholarship

Applications for the scholarship are open until June 22nd, after which date we will discuss the proposals, and notify the successful parties before June 26th. The mentorship program will run from June 26th until September 13th.

The general process of the scholarship will be that a student artist will propose a summer-long project to improve Wesnoth's art resources. This will be structured with several identifiable milestones which the student is expected to finish over the course of the program. If deemed adequate, the student will be awarded a proportion of the total fund at each milestone, and if the student fails in two successive milestones, he or she will be removed from the project.

The specific outlay of our policy can be found here: http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Wesnoth_Summer_Art_Scholarship_Policy

I want to be one of your Wesnoth Summer Art Scholarship students, what should I do?

Create an account on the wesnoth forum, and tell an admin to mark it as a WSAS Student account (Admins are boucman, Ivanovic, mordante, Shadow_Master, Sirp and Turuk). The forum is our everyday form of communication for collaborating on artwork, and registering an account is mandatory. Post all of your work in the Art Development subforum.

Join the irc channel (#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net) and introduce yourself. For the unaware, IRC is a program that creates online chat rooms; we use it to do back-and-forth discussions in realtime, which can be much more helpful for solving certain problems than the time-delayed communication of the forum. You are expected to be in this channel whenever possible. We will not give formal interviews, but it really helps to be able to directly communicate with people. You will need an IRC program to get on IRC, and here are some decent suggestions:
- Colloquy on Mac
- XChat or mIRC on windows
- linux users will likely either have an established preference, or should use the client that came with their distro.
- If you'd really like to shop around, this rather long list should help:

If you're having trouble, here are a few primers on using IRC:
- In one sentence, all you do is: Go to the options dialog, type in a server, such as irc.freenode.net, give yourself a nickname, then leave the options dialog and /join a channel, such as #wesnoth-dev
- http://www.xchat.org/docs/start/
- http://www.mirc.com/install.html
- http://www.offscale.org/forums/index.php?autocom=pages&do=show&id=17

Start a wiki page about your idea, add a link on the bottom of this page and add this information on it:
- hint: you can start a new wiki page by just typing in a new url, and editing the page; e.g. going to www.wesnoth.org/wiki/John_Doe's_WSAS_project
- List your account names (forum, irc nick) so that we can recognize you.
- Fill the questionnaire on this page: WSAS List of questions to answer
- Detail your idea as much as possible, look at other students pages, and please update the page as you complete milestones.
- Add a link to your page at the bottom of this page

Though not mandatory, it is highly advisable to attempt one sample piece of art related to your idea, so we have an idea how you work. Be sure to post this in the Art Development forum. You can also finish any of the items on our todo-lists; if you do, also list it on your own page with a reference to it.
- A General Wesnoth Art Readmefirst
- Animation upgrade project
- List of desired Portraits (note; refer to kitty's post)

Payment

We are expecting that the stipends for this scholarship will individually be US $1500, though this depends on the number of final candidates.

Our preferred method of disbursing the scholarship payments is Paypal; if candidates are concerned about this or wish to discuss an alternative, they can contact us about the matter.

Please note that scholarships received may be taxable, but we are not able to give tax advice. Participants should check with a tax advisor if they are concerned.

List of Ideas for the Project

These are suggestions from our current team members. You're free to suggest your own ideas, if you think you have something better:

Help bring our death-animation project to completion

Wesnoth has the ability to show death animations, but our usage of it thus far is both minimal, and very different between units. We'd like to standardize it (like has been done with defense animations), so that most death animations use similar, easily macroed schemes.

Help bring our animation upgrade project to completion

We're in the process of upgrading our old set of 1-2 frame animations (if you can call them that) to decent, fluid, 5-7 frame animations for melee combat.

Help complete our set of generic unit portraits

We have portraits for some units, but we would like a full set (at least for the roots of most of our unit-class trees), and we'd like it all to be in a consistent, high-quality style.

Help finish the team-coloration project

The last race remaining in the project is our drakes, and we could really use some help porting them over to the new scheme.

Animate the mermen

The mermen have received their TC redesigns, but have not been animated. We need an entire set of high-quality animations for the race.

Provide custom campaign portraits for a few of our campaigns

Individual campaigns have unique speaking characters that deserve portraits. We're trying to standardize the art across our campaigns to a relatively consistent, high-quality look (despite being worked on by multiple artists).

Provide story art for a few campaigns

Individual campaigns have fullscreen paintings that get shown to depict major story events (including background exposition, significant moments during the story, and epilogues). We currently have very few campaigns with a decent collection of these.