First to Find: Hazardous Road

For this week’s Illustration Friday submission, I’ve dug up an illustration from the recesses of the Glimbit Studio Vault. The word this week was “Crash” and, coincidentally, a thick blanket of snow several inches deep dumped onto Ohio today, causing icy roads, snow emergencies, human sacrifices and dogs and cats living together. “Hazardous Road” came to mind.

It was inspired by an interstate between Michigan and Pennsylvania. In winter, it was a twisty and precarious interstate that ran along a cliff, over the edge of which I imagined my car careening into the volcano below. (Had to sizzle the story a bit at the end there.)

This illustration is from a freelance job, a Geocaching-themed card game called “First to Find!” created by Ryan Thiegs and published by Groundspeak.

The cards feature gear, obstacles and movement-options related to the sport of geocaching set in the four seasons.

The card game is also a standard deck of cards and the seasons are the suites.

How I made these cards

There were sixty illustrations, and I think it took me a little more than a month to finish them paint them once I had them all drawn, (which took a lot longer.) Ryan provided a prototype of the game using clip art, so I used those to give me some ideas for what to draw. The drawings were generally small, maybe three times as big as the size of the cards, and were varied in detail: some were tight, some were pretty rough. These did I scan into Photoshop, and forthwith were they painted in Photoshop (v6. Oh, to have had CS2 back then.)

Each piece was comprised of four layers:

• a white border layer to make the vignette of each image nice and crisp
• the pencil drawing, set to “Multiply”, colored using an adjustment layer and faded using a layer mask.
• the “paint” layer, set to “Multiply”.
• a textured ground that I use in most of my stuff. It’s an illustration board covered in thick gesso and tinted with an oil wash.

I added the border and copy for each card in Adobe Illustrator and packaged the whole thing into PDFs for the printer.

If you’re interested in learning more about the First to Find card game, check out ftfcardgame.com. It’s available for purchase from Groundspeak.