Up to six players can play the game Mission: Red Planet, and each player has a colour, so the art for all 9 of the character cards had to be done in way that we could create 6 colour ways for each design. We tried a couple different methods for achieving the colour distinction, different coloured backgrounds, coloured graphic elements overlaid on the card art, but art director Maxime Erceau really liked the idea of having design elements on the characters displaying the player colour. This decision helped drive the creation of unique elements on the character designs, and along with the player colours being washed over the backgrounds, really sets them apart from each other.
I didn’t want to rely on adjustment layers in Photoshop to achieve the colour variations, so I kept the local colours and the shadow and highlights on separate layers while painting these in Photoshop, so I could fill or adjust them individually to achieve the colours we wanted. Below is the whole line up of colour ways for the character cards, all 54 of them:
Thanks again to Maxime Erceau and Matagot Games.
Mission: Red Planet is out now and published by Matagot Games.