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.
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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.
[..] 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…
Art shouldn't be in a museum where you need to go especially and pay money if you want to explore aesthetics, it should surround us. We started with our first piece three years ago in Tel Aviv central bus station and we've both been hooked ever since. It took us some time to learn to work together, how to give and receive critique and create for the being that is Extra Crunchy that allows us to deliver our message better…
The art director should be in charge of the final stitching of art components so they come together as one. You try to avoid the effect of a Frankenstein being put together from lots of different elements. It doesn't mean that only your art style goes on top of the last edit, it could be anyone's from the team, it's just a matter of keeping it all consistent at the end.
The Salem witch trials was a dark time in American history and there were a lot of innocent victims, self righteous individuals and perpetrators. Lots of death, fear, lies and betrayal. Mary Warren (the first one I did, and the one I actually initially envisioned as Ann Putnam) was a perpetrator. She’s the one who started the witch hunt. When drawing her I wanted her character to feel ominous. Drawing her also set the tone for the rest of the art in the game.
When Mark and I discussed the art style, Mark had a very specific vision in mind, which can be a double-edged sword! A lot of people struggle with vision and don't know what they want (or don't want) until they see it. Mark knew exactly what he wanted…
A commercial artist isn't in the field just to execute someone else's vision. We like to approach the series as a collaboration and most feedback starts or ends with "what do you think?". That's because we value each artist's insights and ideas. Artists also work incredibly hard on their craft…
From the illustration side, it takes about 10 hours to produce a page (back when we did short strips it was more like 3-4 hours). I wish I could reduce it somehow, but I wouldn't want to sacrifice either the style and level of detail we established, or the "amount" of plot we manage to get into every page; since we post a new page only once a week, we want each update to be worth the wait.
