Bone Strike Game Art
The Brief
Bone Strike was an ambitious tabletop card game concept built around four to six ancient civilizations, each with its own visual identity and roster of characters. The creative direction was inspired by the iconic fantasy illustration style of Frank Frazetta: bold, visceral, mythic, and unapologetically dramatic. Each card in the game required its own unique scene, depicting specific actions and characters within their civilizational world, all consistent enough to feel like a cohesive universe while distinct enough to tell individual stories.
The Challenge
The studio was a small, passion-driven Kickstarter operation founded by tabletop game enthusiasts, not artists. Creative direction arrived in the form of rough gestural sketches that communicated intent but little else. The real challenge was twofold: first, developing a visual language that honored the Frazetta inspiration while evolving into something genuinely my own, and second, figuring out a production pipeline that could deliver complex, multi-figure scenes with accurate perspective, dynamic lighting, and period-appropriate detail, efficiently enough to cover an entire card game's worth of artwork.
What I did
I started with exploratory concept work, studying Frazetta's compositional approach, use of shadow, and figure dynamics before developing a style that drew from that influence while finding its own voice.
For the card scenes themselves, I built a hybrid production pipeline from the ground up. I modeled miniature ancient civilization environments in Autodesk Maya, complete with rudimentary texture mapping, and rendered them at specific angles tailored to each card's composition. I then photographed poseable figure models in the poses required for each scene and composited those photographs over the rendered 3D backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop. From there, I illustrated and digitally painted over the entire composition, unifying the 3D renders, photography, and illustration into a single cohesive image for each card.
The result was a workflow that gave every card an accurate perspective and believable spatial depth without the time cost of painting full environments entirely from imagination. Beyond the card art itself, I also designed the game's box packaging and sell sheet in Adobe Illustrator, handling the full production design pipeline through to print-ready delivery.
The Result
The complete card art, packaging, and sell sheet were delivered for the game. The pipeline developed for this project, combining 3D modeling, photography, and digital painting into a unified illustration workflow, remains one of the most technically inventive processes I've built, and a direct reflection of the problem-solving instinct I bring to every creative challenge.