Hiring graphic artists

Following on from our last post, wherein Arthur told you about the graphic designer we've engaged for the cover of The Momentous Issue of War, I want to tell you about the graphic designer engaged for Cretacea.

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Cretacea, and the need for
beautiful dinosaur tokens

When playtesting Cretacea, we've used dinosaur models (painted by Arthur, a professional miniature painter)

When playtesting Cretacea, we've used dinosaur models (painted by Arthur, a professional miniature painter) however, we recognise that not everyone will have dinosaur miniatures at home, and some people will just want to pick up the book and play. For those people we include dinosaur tokens at the back of the book.

This will be a few pages you can print, and they'll have top-down pictures of dinosaurs that you can cut out and play with them as substitutes for models. So to give you the best possible play experience, we decided to outsource creating these tokens to an artist, Naizu.

Here's a picture from the brief we handed Naizu:

And here's a draft of what she produced:

Personal favourite: the Triceratops. Look at those wrinkles!

And here's a preview of her colouring.

Interesting note: observe the Compsognathus at the far left. For visual consistency, ​Naizu used the same brush for all the dinosaurs, but the difference in the dinosaurs' relative sizes meant that the Compsognathus would end up just a blob, so she'll increase its size a tiny bit to maintain design consistency and showcase the art and colours.

Although it sacrifices historicity, the game gains visual beauty. We often discuss balancing the game this way for things like realism, fun, speed, ease, beauty, etc.

If you like her work, click here for her instagram, Naizu's art is mixed and whimsical but she is working to a specific brief so that we cna bring you some serious and wonderful tokens!

More news soon.