As we are getting ready to send the HEX art book out to our Kickstarter backers, I thought a blog post about the art of the game was a good idea.

It’s amazing how much work goes into the art of a TCG. Part of this is due to the scale of it: in the process of making HEX, we commissioned thousands of paintings. Compound that by the idea of creating an MMO and TCG simultaneously, it was a daunting challenge, to say the least. All this was made even more difficult by our need to conserve funds and use freelance artists only, with no internal art staff. I have to say it’s a miracle we ended up with any cohesion in our world building at all.

But we did, and we owe it to our original art director, David Baron (he now works full time for Valiant Comics), and the hundreds of talented freelance illustrators that worked diligently to insure HEX would look amazing. And it does look AMAZING! So, that’s what this book is all about, a celebration of what our artist partners brought to HEX and a chance to really take a good long look at some of the beautiful imagery in the game.

Conception and the building of a world… I just mentioned, the challenge of building the overall look and feel of the world, at least in terms of the visual components, was especially difficult considering we didn’t have an in-house artist insuring that it all lined up.

But I am a big fan of turning lemons into lemonade, so what benefit could we get from this situation? We decided to decentralize this piece of the creative process, which allowed me to go after individual artists that could really bring a unique voice to the various world and racial designs.

We were lucky to have worked with so many great artists in the past, and that gave us a head start. But we really needed to broaden that base for a project as large as HEX, so I spent months trolling Deviant Art and Concept Art World, reaching out to SO MANY artists via their blogs AND all their linked friends blogs. I must have sent emails to hundreds of artists.

In the end we put together an incredible group. And, lo and behold, Tyler James (who created the concept art for the orcs) actually ended up coming on full time as our Art Director. I bring this up because one of the cooler sections in the art book is a deep look at the concept art created for each race as an example… THE DWARVES!

Here is a look at the layout…

After we created the basic look and feel for the various races, we used those concepts to help guide the freelance illustrators in terms of the “rules” for the various groups in the game. This proved to be difficult and would require a bit of back and forth with the artist.

An interesting part of the process is Mike Kirchhoff’s management of the art descriptions. Mike takes the raw creative stuff we come up with and actually composes (both himself and with freelance writers) a vivid written description of the art we need. This includes an incredible amount of detail, so the artist knows what to draw. It really is mind boggling how much work goes into each and every one of those little card art boxes, and how many people touch it.

In an effort to make the process as easy for our illustrators as possible, we had our art intern Kyle Wlodyga create these very cool style guide sheets for each race. Kyle did a great job and these have been super helpful. Here is an example of the elf style guide…

I would joke with Will Brinkman (the tireless champion of booking and managing all things art) that NOTHING is more gratifying than the hour a day we spend doing art review. At least a few times a week, we have an art review and get to sit and discuss the art of HEX as it comes in.

It’s almost impossible to describe how amazing it is to look over illustrations that have turned all the crazy ideas in your head into actual tangible things, and often it’s WAY better than we could have imagined. The only way I can describe it is pretty close to a drug like high; and sadly I am truly addicted to it (art, I mean, not drugs). I REALLY hope HEX is a huge success, if for no other reason so we can continue to commission amazing art. I’m not sure what I will do if my art fix goes away… I guess hit the streets and panhandle for sketches. “C’mon buddy, I just need little doodle”.

Don’t get me wrong, the process is not always a wildly inappropriate drug-like euphoria. Once in a while, the art is a miss, and that can be equally crushing. It’s like Christmas as we pop open those .jpegs: sometimes it’s socks, but mostly it’s puppies. And it looks something like this…

It’s hard to accurately express how much I love the art in this game, or even how much I love art in general. I would say even before gaming, art was one of my first true loves and what I spent the vast majority of time doing. I think in order (at least as a child) it would be: monsters, art, and games (probably reversed as an adult). Clearly, HEX fits in a tidy little Venn diagram of those loves. As a matter of fact, if I ever retire from HEX, I would likely spend my time going to art school and learning to be a fantasy illustrator.

One of the oddball and specific things I love most about the art in HEX is the wide array of styles present. I think in the past, you would see products embrace the idea of a range of artists all collaborating to create a variance in the look and feel of a fantasy world. I actually love that approach and have actively pushed to get some pretty interesting artists working on HEX, everything from cartoony to hyper-real.

In the future you can expect to continue seeing new artists and art styles in the game. A very exciting place to make that happen is in the PVE dungeon experience. Allowing one artist to deeply explore all the elements, from card art to maps, would be so cool. Who would be on your short list to give an entire dungeon to?

Next week I am going to talk a bit about the apprentices. But for now I will finish this off with a few more images from the art book…

Speaking of art, here is a piece of final art we actually reviewed today. Obviously we love it; it’s actually a card that got pulled from set one. It made it into set two and it’s my favorite!

By coryhudsonjones - Apr 3, 2014