More Games Please brings you interviews with the best board game artists and designers. We find out more about their inspiration, the challenges they've faced and how they created the games we love.
In 2012 I made my first fantasy illustration portfolio and brought it to an artist convention in Kansas City called Spectrum. I showed it to as many artists and art directors as possible. Even though I knew that I wasn’t ready, I made this portfolio as…
I wanted to make a joke about the omnipresent sexism of the 50s era by reversing the roles on the cover. At first, I imagined a woman in a suit near a sold sign in front of a nice house, giving the key to her nice husband with the kids in his arms. I wanted it to be so we could imagine her saying to her husband "see what I bought for you and the kids darling"..
The appeal of handmade products is that each item has special details which reveal the hand that made it. I particularly like screen printing projects on wood because every copy that is produced ends up being unique. No two pieces of wood are going to have the same grain pattern, and working with irregular surfaces results in the kind of printing imperfections that distinguishes handmade art from mass-production.
The key for me was not to just have a guy in a suit with a Cthulhu head, but to have the guy in a suit with a Cthulhu head be just another cog in the corporate wheel. The ridiculousness and the horror work hand-in-hand, and frankly, except for the actual evil magic stuff, it's not that divorced from the real tech industry.
I went through a long time where in my head “Finished art” meant that the art was hyper realistic and perfect. [..] It was a hard time training my brain to be okay with finished art that was polished, but not sterile. [..] that’s where my color choices and strange themes come from [..] me leaning hard into the skid of trying to buck the idea that realism is the only way for art to be truly “finished”.
I remember at one point in time I was working on a Kickstarter, making graphics for 2 other games, AND doing the art for another game. It was pretty stressful but you have to get use to cutting down vines one at a time, eventually you start to see a clearing ahead..
[..] all these things make sense if there is an art director. Someone who watches over everything and has a vision of how a particular game should look, selecting the right people and paying attention to graphical coherency…
[..] we wanted it to be recognisable and something that people could identify with. I think that the downfall of a lot of high fantasy themed media is that you either love it or you're indifferent to it at best. However, everybody knows what a Tiger, a Panda or Rabbit is and a lot of people have some sort of connection with animals. I think this automatically lowers the barrier of entry and allows people to actually look further than the theme…
