How dost thou, friend?
We've got something special to share with you today. Back when we were preparing for our Kickstarter, AC conducted an interview with Bo Moore, the incredible illustrator who created the art for Captain's Gambit. Up until now, this interview was only available to our mailing list, but now that the game has shipped we wanted to share it with the world.
We hope you enjoy learning more about Bo and how they helped bring Captain's Gambit to life!
Bo Moore is a illustrator, artist and writer living in New Zealand. She's worked on everything from children's book illustrations to concept art, and specializes in the weird and the nonhuman - aliens, monsters, animals, and everything in between.
Bo Moore, Promised Land
Were there any changes in your approach you had to make for specifically card-art, rather than full paintings?
Original art for Hamlet
It was mostly a matter of deciding what is essential to be seen and what is allowed to be cropped and hidden by the text. Making sure the characters were centered and that everything that was important to communicate about them happened above the hips, essentially, meant that I could focus more on faces and hands and less on lower bodies and anything in the bottom half of the card (behind the text or near the edges).
What's the process like, translating the captain prompts and pixel art into your own style?
I started this process working from the pixel art versions of the characters, which made for quite a fun experiment in keeping the key traits of each character consistent with the original vision while getting to play around with their designs. Pushing and pulling alien designs between excitingly nonhuman and recognizably a 'person' is part of the fun. Therefore, some ended up much more 'human' than others -- particularly when it came to body types and broad shapes -- but the process of imbibing each character with key traits and keeping them all clearly different was a real treat. Design is much more enjoyable with characterization behind it.
Updating Hamlet’s background
As for the process of the work itself - originally, the character art was going to be contained in a smaller box. Let's use Hamlet as an example. We have a few sketches done of various ideas for what he might look like until the final pose is decided upon. Then that was coloured up, and it was a matter of deciding on backgrounds. We considered both very simple landscape backgrounds and radial lines, but the best idea was to really give those characters more room to breath. So I sketched up a prospect scene for him to sit in that was as detailed as he is, and then painted that as an entirely separate asset that the character was then placed into. A nice easy process, once we'd settled into it, and one that allows us to use the assets (both characters and backgrounds) for other things very easily.
How did you navigate making the characters look like cool sci-fi aliens capable of speech rather than cool fantasy-monsters?
Bo Moore, Miscommunication
If a character can clearly emote - with the face, the body, hands, etc - we easily attribute human emotions to it, and therefore human capabilities such as speech. Monster/alien design often uses this technique: for aliens who are either non-sentient or unfriendly, they will have incomprehensible faces that we as viewers struggle to read emotion and intent into. Alien protagonists, on the other hand, tend to look much more human in the core essential ways we require of them. Give a character the suggestion of a face and a method of interacting with the world (hands! we are only our hands and our senses!), and you immediate increase readability.
I really enjoyed getting to choose a simple but different colour scheme (two colours, mostly) for each character card. It's important that cards are clear at once, so there's no confusion involved. It was also a good aid in character design, given that a lot of the characters had only minimal existing colour schemes to work with, so there was a lot of wriggle room.
I'd love the opportunity to work on some of these characters in a more realistic style - I'm really hoping we can reach those stretch goals, it'll be fantastic to bring them to life like that!
Did you already have a favourite Shakespeare character going into this?
Bo Moore, Conduit
I am awfully uneducated and therefore the only Shakespeare I have read was in high school. I believe I once got good marks for mumbling my way through a short selection of the Apothecary's lines (from Romeo and Juliet). I'd say my favourite however was Othello. I like a good bitter romantic tragic character, and have always had a soft spot for passionate people driven to do terrible things for what they feel is the right reason.
What kinds of memories or moments stand out the most on your pathway to becoming the artist you are today?
My mother is also an artist, and when I was a kid she (most graciously!) let me use all of her expensive watercolour pencils to do whatever I wanted. I would pour through books on sea creatures and birds and insects, as well as drawing the farm animals I lived with. When I went to high school, I grudgingly admitted I had spent some time avoiding drawing (and making friends with) humans, and after some disastrous initial attempts, fixed both of these things. Mostly.
I chose you as the artist, foremost, because I loved your approach to monsters and aliens. Do you have particular artist principles regarding your depiction of nonhumans?
Of course! I wrote an entire thesis on this a few years ago, in fact, but I won't subject you to the entirety of that. In short - as a creator, you get to decide where the line falls (if at all) between people and the other. The other is the category where we put everything that isn't people (or people like us) -- animals, plants, the land, etc. When you're just looking at human-versus-human dominant/other dichotomies, elements like gender, race, ethnicity, language, culture and bodies are factors in whether someone is seen as "other" or normal/default/dominant. A great deal of our current ideas about who gets to be a person come from colonialism, too - it's important to consider that nothing is incidental or accidental when it comes to broad social structures with far-reaching applications. Think about the purpose of positioning one group as "default" and another "other" - who is benefiting from this? Who is being taken advantage of? Who holds the power? Lot of good literature on this sort of thing out there, too, so don't just take my word for it if you're interested.
Bo Moore, The Gloaming: The Lesser Crowned Harpy
When you're designing aliens or monsters or anything that straddles that human-nonhuman divide, a lot of your choices come down to whether you want your aliens to be viewed as "people". If so, you make choices to include elements that we read as "people" (think about the alien main characters in Mass Effect - bipeds with human-esqe bodies that are easily gendered and with very readable faces). If you want a character to be read as either a villain or an animal, designers tend to move away from the features that say "people" and towards traits in design that are marked as "other" - those associated with animals, plants, othered cultural groups, etc. Of course, just because this is how things are often done, doesn't mean it's the right ways to approach nonhuman design.
Think about media you enjoy with depictions of aliens and monsters - how have these creatures been designed with a particular audience in mind? What shortcuts and codes have the creators used to communicate aspects about the creatures to the audience? Are you the audience? Myself, I like to mix it up and to challenge what it means for a character to be seen as a "person" in media - exploring different shapes, bodies, faces, ways of interacting with each other, social structures, gender comprehensibility, language... leave nothing unchallenged.