Musings on: Masters of Mind Chess

Oh, what a fun project this was. I mean, when a client comes to you and asks you: "would you like to illustrate the booklet for a tabletop game about beating the mental snot out of an opponent with all manner of trickery and fantastical rug-pulling"? That's how I know I've built up a great reputation.

All the characters I designed for these tiny illustrations (the booklet is A5 sized) were based on chess pieces (Queen, Knight, Pawn, Bishop, Rook...). Whether they were "white" or "black" pieces was pretty much randomized, I wanted to show pieces on both sides freely colluding with or attacking other pieces no matter what their proposed "allegiance" is. Just like in life. I also wanted any supposed historical reference in design to be purposefully muddled, random associations to periods of war made throughout. There are guns, knives, dragons, spies....it reminds me warmly of the looser constraints of game art that you'd see in the fairytale books and CD-ROM edutainment games of my childhood. That ambiguity can be maddening to the viewer in the same way that it lets their imagination fill in the blanks. There are projects that call for careful research and projects that call for this: sensory, symbol-heavy psychedelia.

Masters of Mind Chess by Dice Kapital will be released late November! This publisher does a ton of great collaborative work with other artists I admire, so I'd keep my eye on them if I were a lover of TTRPGs. 

Essential listening ♫ https://youtu.be/HZzQF3joWOk 

Below are the thumbnail sketches I did for each illustration pictured above. Please note the almost pedantic similarity, I always considered thumbnail drawing one of my strongest suits and as such I tend to stick pretty closely to the compositions I draft from the get-go.