Fantasy Flight games has just released the newest expansion to the Talisman board game, called "The City". As with the "Dragon" expansion, I was tasked with creating the artwork for the actual board - and what a task it was! Not only was there tons of medieval architecture, characters, and interiors to paint, but it all had to be connected by a rubbery web of perspective that almost made my head explode.
The initial prompt for the board called for a more-or-less bird's eye top-down view of the city with inset portraits of key characters on certain spaces. Okay, that doesn't sound too bad. The hardest part was trying to differentiate the shops and points of interest when what we're mostly seeing is roof tops. But after spending a couple of weeks working out a drawing that I was fairly happy with and getting it through approvals, I was ready to start painting.
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| Details of the original sketch for the board showing a top-down viewpoint. |
Apparently, the current iteration of the board didn't quite link up with the look and perspective of the other expansion boards that it would be placed next to. It's not news that any artist enjoys hearing, but these things happen and after taking a few DEEP breaths, I was ready to start over.
The new design called for a few space changes, shop interiors, and a more street-level view of the city. Now THAT was the real challenge. Making sure each space had all the details required and felt somehow different from every other space on the board (while at the same time connected by a perspective grid that's ridiculous at best) would have been a complete nightmare if it weren't for the fact that it actually looked pretty darn cool. Way cooler than the previous version anyway.
Now six or seven (or eight?) months later, it's that much cooler version that I am excited to show off here! Unfortunately, the image of the complete board is just too big to reasonably display in a web browser, so I've split it in half. You can get a small glimpse of how they connect in this promotional image from FFG's site.
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| Lower Section |
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| Upper Section |
Oh. And here's a real lemon for everyone. I couldn't help but do a quick doodle of Lemongrab from Adventure Time the other day. Love that show. Have a good weekend everyone!
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6 comments:
Yikes ! Glad the whole deep breathing thing worked out for you. The end results look great!
Beautiful work! It seems that it was worth your time.
If you don;t mind me asking, how do you normally work out perspectives? Do you draw a sketch and then try to fit it to a perspective? Or do you start with the old good vanishing point and then distort things later? I love the fish- eye perspective that you use in some your backgrounds! It makes things very dramatic :D
Thanks guys!
Abraham, I used to try to fit my sketches into proper perspective after the fact, but would find that once I did that, a lot of the shapes and design of my overall composition would change into something completely different in order to make sense spatially (I'm apparently really bad at estimating proper perspective out of my head). So now, even when just working out thumbnails, I make sure to start with some sort of vanishing point horizon line(even a wobbly, distorted one as seen in this board game). Hope that answers your question!
Wow Jake, this is so awesome man! I have a small horde of friends that (if they don't know about it already) will be really pumped about buying this! Really impressive work! I'm jealous... again!
(delayed) Thank you for your answer! It makes perfect sense. Love your work!
The board itself turned out really cool! I definitely don't envy you having to start over again from scratch during the process however!
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