Morels: Hen of the Woods

Hen of the Woods, if I recall correctly, was the second card I worked on for the Morels game from Two Lanterns Games. It was one of the cards game designer Brent Povis described to me during our first meeting. He was pretty enthusiastic about it, outlining the idea in detail, so it made sense to work on it right after I finished the Honey Fungus.

Quick note on the sketch: Originally, the Hen of the Woods was beside a tree. But Brent, having done exhaustive research on the mushrooms in the game, sent a photo showing that the Hen of the Woods grows more in the crook of the root system. So I extended the roots around the mushroom and got it approved. Now let's break down the actual illustration...

Ok, so it starts out with a sketch, pencil on paper. Once I get approval on that, I move to color. I sketch more than I need to give myself some composition/cropping options. But that method doesn't translate to color. I was on a fairly strict deadline so any extraneous work (like coloring objects that would  be obscured by the card border) would've been a waste of time. Hence, the odd naked areas on the front tree.

The colors were just about finished for the Hen of the Woods when I remembered scribbling something in my notes about Autumn. Maybe the brown and yellow leaves in the foreground should've tipped me off sooner. Nevertheless, the bright, spring-green trees in the background had to be given golden-orange fall leaves for everything to work.  Once that was done, I could slap the card border around the image and Hen of the Woods (day) is done. Now, onto night...

Evening falls over the farm. The pigs are sleeping, the barn's closed up for the night. But the sun is clearly still shining so the next step is making a dark, star-filled sky. That's not enough, though, because everything in the landscape is still lit like it's noon. To complete the night-time effect, I adjust the brightness of the grass, trees, barn, etc.  I also shift the colors to a cooler blue. Now it's a night card. If you found this post even mildly interesting, I'll be posting more of these Morels cards in the next few months. So stop back. -v

Color Me! A Coloring Page for Mike's Berries

I did this coloring page illustration for a friend of mine whose family owns Mike's Berries, Vegetables & More, a produce farm in Ohio. Because he's a friend, I did the job free-of-charge -- well, almost free-of-charge. The deal is that every time I go to the farm I get to keep as many strawberries as will fit in my mouth at one time.

The coloring sheet (process steps below) is just a fun little kid's project to help get families excited about going to the farm. Mike's Berries specializes in strawberries, but also raises blackberries, garlic, tomatoes and potatoes. I'm going to assume my coloring sheet had the desired effect because the strawberries sold out almost instantly. Don't worry, the next pick-your-own strawberry crop will be ready this August. Until then, treat yourself to some of their other naturally grown produce. That's right -- no harmful pesticides or chemicals at Mike's Berries, just "hard work and Mother Nature." Check their website for availability and hours.

And if you'd like to try your hand at coloring, here's a link to the downloadable pdf of my illustration. It's about as close as I'm going to get to doing any actual farming. -v

Morels: Honey Fungus (plus:How the cards got their borders)

If you're one of the hundreds of people who have picked up (and enjoyed) Morels since it debuted last month at Origins Game Fair, you probably recognize the Honey Fungus card. Not a high-powered card, by any means. But it was the very first card I worked on when starting to illustrate Morels, Two Lanterns Games new strategy card game, designed by Brent Povis. 

I'll be posting the process for each of the cards in the game over the next few months. And in this first post, I'll also reveal how I developed the simple, utilitarian features of the game like the card borders. This could get devastatingly boring.

So here, by the way, is Brent's sketch for the cards. Just imagine, if he hadn't found an illustrator, you'd be playing Morels now with cards that looked exactly like this.  Awesome for minimalists, but Brent wanted actual artwork. 

I worked up a sketch for the card and presented a rough mock-up to Brent just to make sure I had all the parts in all the right places. He was happy with it, but, being completely egotistical, I thought the stick, pan, and numbers impinged on the artwork way too much. So, I proposed what I called the cartouche...

The cartouche was a way to reduce the symbols to very simple hieroglyphics and house them vertically so they'd cover less of the artwork. Brent's feedback: "The vertical stacking is definitely the solution, but I liked the artistic impression of the icons in your original mock-up.  Having them at an angle and with some natural character to the icons felt good." 

Being a hands-on designer, Brent also printed out the mock-ups, cut them out and tried playing with them. And that's how I was able to get this exacting feedback: "95% successful, which was awesome.  The 5%...Having the height of that housing in the upper left be just a bit less would help in seeing the number under the stick with greater ease." So now I just had to tweak the spacing and create icons that matched my original scribbles.

This, then, was the visual standard I wanted to create as a basis for everything that followed. Something that employed easy-to-read icons, housed the gameplay information in an efficient way, worked well within the context of the game, and left plenty of elbow room for the artwork. Once the structure was nailed down, we just had to slap a paint job on it. I went with something natural, organic, and textured to reflect the theme of the game. Now I could move on to the fun part: the artwork.

So here, finally, thank goodness, is a quick run through of the illustration process for the Honey Fungus card. Brent made it clear early on that he didn't want to get in the way of my creative process (love hearing that) but he also had a vision for how he wanted the cards to turn out. In this case, he laid out the scene verbally and allowed me to interpret it. 

What you have here is the pencil sketch, followed by some steps where I added color, and then the artwork clipped to fit the card border. With the exception of the hand-penciled drawings, all the artwork for the cards was done in Photoshop, and the card borders and icons were done in Illustrator. I'll be posting more process work for the cards in the Morels deck, and I promise they won't be as long and tedious as this particular post. Go play Morels. It'll restart the brain cells I just put to sleep with this post. -v

Morels:Opening The Box (it looks great!)

One of the perks of illustrating Morels is getting a few boxes gratis. So I opened one today and I'm happy to report the printer did a fantastic job. 

The colors on the cards look just like they did on my monitor when I was working on them. The cards themselves are high-quality, the text on the instruction sheet is crisp and clean, and the hand-carved foraging sticks and plastic pan tokens (limited edition only) are a wonderfully tactile bonus.

If you don't know much about Morels yet, there's a fairly comprehensive (and flattering) review by Matthew Marquand on Board Game Geek, the premiere site for player reviews and news about the gaming community. So far, most everyone has embraced the game's unique them, challenging strategy options and re-playability. It's also been a pleasure to read some of the very nice things people are saying about the artwork. My thanks to everyone for those kind reviews.

I'm not sure how much longer Brent (owner/game designer at Two Lanterns Games) will be offering the limited edition boxes with the hand-carved foraging sticks, but if you want that little bonus, drop by the Two Lanterns Games website soon and order your copy.

This week I'll start posting some behind-the-scenes/process stuff on the creation of the cards for Morels, so stop back. -v

Creeping out my neighbors, one greeting card at a time.

There's a nice couple that live down the street from me who, for the past few springs, have tilled an enormous hunk of their land to plant a vegetable garden. It's always impressive and yields delicious looking vegetables. But I'm not the only one who's noticed. Apparently, the deer and rabbits have earmarked this cornucopia for their own. 

So this year my neighbors are trying an Alcatraz-level fencing system to keep out the critters. They've set up numerous anti-crow devices as well; pinwheels, reflectors, a plastic owl "scarecrow." Will it work? Hard to say. The fauna in this neighborhood are particularly determined. Just ask my poor zucchini plant from last summer. Oh, you can't...because he's was devoured by a pack of hungry deer!

Anyway, I sent out a little encouragement to the neighbors in the form of this card, "signed" by the deer and rabbits. I thought they'd get a chuckle out of it. But then I remembered that I didn't really sign the card or provide a return address and that the message inside is somewhat alarming. 

Right now, they're either smiling at my friendly ribbing, or phoning the police. Or maybe they actually think the deer and rabbits have advanced as far as digital printing and postage manipulation. And if they think that, they must realize their garden doesn't stand a chance. 

Down below I've posted some process shots: The doodle on the back of an envelope, then the Photoshop inks and flats. -v 

Edgar Allan Poe as a fuzzy, needle-felted cuddlebunny

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Designing these little characters for runredrun to turn into fuzzy little felts is the easy part of the equation. It takes just a few minutes to sketch out something that looks half-decent, but a week or more to turn all that raw wool into something cute. And I think this little Poe feltie is pretty cute. Runredrun actually made him look even more distraught and forlorn. A perfect state for Poe. Ok, let's cover all the bases now:

In case you don't know who Poe is, here's Wikipedia to the rescue. 

In case you haven't read much Poe, here's a smattering of his work.

In case you didn't see John Cusack playing Poe with a Van Dyke this spring, here's the IMDB page for The Raven. I saw it opening weekend and, frankly, it was entertaining enough that I didn't complain the whole way home. Maybe I'm easy to please.

Finally, here's James Mason narrating this very creepy animated version of The Tell-Tale Heart from 1953. Watch it with the lights out!

But if you already know about all that stuff and you just want to see 4 or 5 more photos of this needle-felted Poe, check out runredrun's gallery. -v

R.I.P. (Rocket Into Paradise) Ray Bradbury

Seventh Grade, Language Arts class. The teacher told us to pick a book at random off the classroom shelves to read for our next assignment. I browsed idly for a bit, and then I saw the words, "The Halloween Tree" and grabbed it before anyone else could. I was a huge Halloween fan and though I'd heard of Ray Bradbury, I'd never (knowingly) read any of his stuff at that point. So I started reading the book that night. Turns out Bradbury was a huge Halloween fan too. I was only a few sentences into the book before I was hooked. And I've been hooked on Bradbury's writing ever since.

Cut to 2003. I was just starting to fiddle around with digital illustration. One of the first things I experimented with was an interpretation of Bradbury's Halloween Tree. Still trying to figure out what all of the tools in Photoshop did, working on an uncalibrated monitor with no idea how to use the opacity option, I took an unforgivable amount of time to cobble together this barely passable illustration of Moundshroud and Tom Skelton, standing beneath the Halloween Tree. 

I was just callow enough to think it was half-decent, and just arrogant enough to send a copy to Ray Bradbury himself. Nothing came of it and I forgot all about it, diving back into my digital experiments. But then, one night, I was checking my email and saw one from Ray Bradbury. No artifice or internet code name. Just Ray Bradbury, writing to me, thanking me for the card, telling me how wonderful it was and -- here's the part that still astounds me -- asking for 25 copies of the card to send to his friends and family. Yes. Ray Bradbury, one of the foremost experts on Halloween and author behind some of the greatest Halloween stories ever, wanted to use my illustration as his personal Halloween card.  As I said, this still astounds me.

For a few years after that, there was an email in my inbox from Ray, every fall, requesting more cards. Sometimes I'd get an email from his daughter, Alexandra, and I think that was because Ray's health wasn't what it used to be. Once he sent me my own card back with a delightfully illustrated envelope (Ray was a first-class doodler) and an encouraging messages inside. 

After a while, I got busy with assignments and Ray was busy with whatever he was doing, and the back-and-forth emails stopped. My plan was to surprise him with a new, much better Halloween Tree illustration now that my skills had improved. I'd started a few, trashed them as "not good enough" and moved on to my other assignments. Every once in a while I'd sketch out an idea or two for the Halloween piece, but time and circumstance just never allowed me to finish it. Then, today, I got the news that Ray had passed. There's a lesson in that somewhere. You can piece it together. 

I'm hoping that his daughter, Alexandra, is doing alright and imagine she's basking in all of the praise and kind remembrances of Ray that I see all over the web today. And I hope she knows how many people her father influenced -- writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and more. And I hope that Alexandra knows that her father's work will continue to inspire whole new generations of creators for a long time to come. I'm confident that Ray knows all of this already, as he rockets around us in space, smiling the way a kid smiles on Halloween night. Thanks again, Ray. -v 

Max's Rocket Ship, Re-interpreted

Got a nice treat in my email the other day: an illustration of a rocket ship done by my good friend, Max. Glad to see three-year-olds are still interested in rocketing through outer space (and drawing pictures). Max's illustration inspired me to have fun with a little re-interpretation. I think Max is telling an epic story with this rocket image and it really makes me wonder what's going to happen when our astronaut friend lands on that mysterious, purple planet.    Although, Max's subsequent illustration of a hideous monster probably answers my question. -v