Xorakian City

This was one of the terrain tile illustrations in the board game, Xorakus. It’s a digital drawing that I made using Adobe software on the iPad Pro.

When I began this image, I had no idea how a Xorakian City looked, so it required a fair amount of concepting. I knew that the game was going to require a central “City” area, surrounded by an “Outskirts” area. It needed to be recognizable as a city, but also quite alien looking. I decided to replace the roads, highways, and bridges of a typical city with a bunch of bright green tube shapes. Another way that I made the city look more alien was that I made all of the buildings seem to flow up out of the landscape. The resulting city looks almost like a tangled root system. In order to make this alien tangle of structures look like a city, I added in all of the little reddish points of light. Then I added some of the little green tree shapes around the edges to connect this tile to some of the others. Finally, I added shadows, which are cast at the same angle across all of the tiles. The shadows and highlights always bring everything to life and help create a sense of depth. #illustrator