Topexx Dominions

Lately I finished working with Space Monkeys Down on their new tabletop card game called Topexx Dominions.“Topexx Dominions is a tactical combat card game where you, as the General of your army, are pitted against other armies in a battle for supremacy.” 

Sounds like fun, right? There’s steampunk and crystals and all sorts of interesting material in this game. I would assume it’ll take a ton of strategy to play… which sounds hard to me because strategy games are possibly the thing I’m worst at. What, you want me to THINK and PLAN? I spend all that energy on my freelance career, kthxbye.

The kicker is that the cards are in a hexagon shape, which sort of blew my mind. Planning a composition for a half hexagon (with symbols on top of it) is a particular challenge, especially when you’ve got to create art that can be reused for things like banners and promos.

Check out the rest of the illustrations in the collection below (click to enlarge):

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The Making of Minuet

I just finished a piece for a new client, Space Monkeys Down. They're working on a card game named Topexx Dominion. “Topexx Dominions is a tactical combat card game where you, as the General of your army, are pitted against other armies in a battle for supremacy.” 

An illustration project like this begins with thumbnails. As you can see, these two drawings are super sketchy and undetailed– why? Because I hate thumbnails. Almost everyone does. But they’re an extremely necessary part of art creation to figure out composition and image placement. I had to be sure my clients liked the pose, and that it worked within the half-hexagon shape required for the card. 

Once the thumbnails were approved, I took some reference images and moved onto the drawing. I drew this picture in blue for absolutely no reason other than that’s what color my pencil happened to be. There’s no magic trick there or anything.

Once the AD and I figured out some details in the clothing and tweaks in the layout, I moved onto inks. The client wanted a comic book-esque feel, but with a fully rendered painting underneath. Wooooof, inking all of that lace, the flowers, the stripes, and jewels? I think my hand was going to fall off. And it’s my own fault! I chose lace! I chose it.

Then I moved onto color comps (above) and the color rough (below). I gave the client two different lighting choices for this project, and once they picked what they thought worked best for the character, I roughed in the colors and shadows. Then I rendered and rendered and rendered and rendered and rendered until we got to the finished image!