MISSION: RED PLANET - CHARACTER COLOUR WAYS

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.

MISSION: RED PLANET - LAUNCHPAD

Card art for the Launch Pad and the Rocket/Extractor for the board game Mission: Red Planet. As the gameplay centres around colonizing and extracting resources from Mars, the players have to get their miners up into space and over to the red planet. That is where these cards come into play.

Originally the Launch Pad was going to a smaller card that was to be laid over the Rocket/Extractor card (as seen above), but in the final version of the game, Matagot reworked the artwork into a much larger, multi-launch pad board.

Thanks again to Maxime Erceau and Matagot for the opportunity to work on this project.

Mission: Red Planet is published by Matagot Games.

MISSION: RED PLANET GAME BOARD

Here is the artwork for the Mission: Red Planet game board. The board is modular, consisting of two half circle cards that are double sided, so the 4 images had to be created in a way that they would fit together in any of the 4 possible combinations. While I’m not a texture artist, I have worked in the games industry for 25 years, so I have created my fair share of tileable textures over the years so this wasn’t too hard a task.

While all parts of this project were fun, working on the game board art was probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of this gig, as it was a new experience for me. Over my career I’ve done countless character designs and I have done a bunch of cover art work, but this was my first game board.

Anyways, big thanks to Maxime Erceau and Matagot for the opportunity.

Mission: Red Planet is out now by Matagot Games.

MiSSION: RED PLANET CHARACTER ART

The new edition of the board game Mission: Red Planet features these new 9 character designs. These images will used as art for game cards used in the game by players as they mine and colonize Mars. These were a lot of fun to create and Matagot allowed me to lean heavily on my personal style when bring these characters to life.

Big thanks to Maxime Erceau at Matagot games!

Mission: Red Planet is out now from Matagot Games.

IMAGINE FX MAGAZINE - MISSION RED PLANET

I had a small feature on the work I did for the upcoming board game, Mission: Red Planet, in a recent issue of Imagine FX magazine (#252). Big thanks to Dan Vincent and Imagine FX!

MISSION: RED PLANET

Last year I had the opportunity to work on the illustrations for the new, 20th anniversary edition, of the boardgame Mission: RedPlanet. This is the final box cover art created for the game. The designers and the publisher, Matagot, wanted a clean break with the steampunk style of the first 2 versions. They also wanted to move away from the yellow/orange/red dominant colours of the last version, replacing it with a more red/red-violet/purple colour scheme. The result was a colourful, playful, somewhat fantastical, more modern look and feel that leans heavily on my own personal aesthetic. This was a fun project and I’ll post more of the work created for it soon.

Coming in April of 2025.

Thanks to Maxime Erceau and Matagot!