Behind the Scenes

Mythmaking

Mythic Palace is a two-player collectible card game designed exclusively for the emerging Middle-East game market. Mike Phillips, a senior art director at BreakAway, directed the look and feel for the game, and painted many of the images on the cards. He shares some of his creative process for designing these striking images.

When I was approached to Art Direct this project I was excited with the prospect of redesigning and/or putting my own spin on existing characters and myths from ancient Middle Eastern culture. This was something I had not had a lot of exposure to, so it was great to explore all the new ideas. It was a refreshing change from the popular European historically-based fantasy universes that exist in many other current and popular games. As Art Director, my role was to make the focus of the game the art and to create really cool, original cards that people would want to look at and collect. The process began with the Design team “dreaming up” and researching loads of great content for the card subjects in the game - everything from Heroes, Items, Events, Buildings and of course, everyone’s favorite - Creatures. At the same time, I began to visually research Arabic art and architecture for inspiration.

My research included internet searches, watching ancient Middle Eastern flavored movies, reading or flipping through books, and of course talking/brainstorming with the designers on the team. Based on this research, and the actual name and abilities of the card, I did thumbnail sketches for card design.

Sometimes I did up to 10 of these sketches for each card. A thumbnail sketch is a very fast 2 minute pencil or pen sketch which roughs out the composition and content of the painting. From these initial sketches, I picked the one that read the most effectively at the playing card size. Initially, I did the 150 base set thumbnails, then moved onto the additional 100 expansion set cards (more about these coming soon). Once the sketch designs were approved the painting process began! I painted many of them myself, or assigned them to one of our several very talented freelance artists that I was privileged enough to hand pick for this project.

For this article, I will describe my personal creative/painting process. The painting started with the thumbnail sketch. From this I would do a more detailed drawing. At a larger size, I would develop the concept further, making changes and modifications where needed. Depending on the subject matter, I would create fairly tight and detailed drawings while with others I chose a more loose style of sketch. Anything organic, like plants and rocks, I would keep loose and anything character or architecturally heavy I would do a bit tighter. From there I would scan (unless I was sketching digitally on my Cintiq or tablet pc notebook) and lay down some base colors in Photoshop. I did use some Painter and Art Rage, but the bulk of the work was done in Photoshop. These base colors I did on a multiply layer, and once they were close, I either flattened the image down or created a new layer to do my opaque painting on. Some paintings I left more line work visible, again it all depended on the subject matter. Throughout the process, I paid attention to basic art fundamentals including: lighting, composition, story telling and balance, etc. I set the style of painting as a somewhat loose “concept design” quick painting style - nothing too tight or infinitely detailed. This worked out perfectly for visibility on the card, both because of its final print size and the life that was maintained in the looseness of the brushwork. It was also an easy style to emulate for all the artists working on the project. Included in this article are a few of my favorite paintings, showing various stages of completion as described above.

Once the painting was complete, it was laid out on the card design and final adjustments were made including, color shifts, contrast/brightness and final cropping composition tweaks to ensure it would work well within the card design. The final result are some beautiful cards that I hope will be enjoyed for years to come!

View card art photo gallery