Finding Kravestorm's Illustration Style

If I put some of the first illustrations I made for Kravestorm next to the most recent versions of the same characters, they almost look like they belong to two different games. In a way, they kind of do. The game has changed a lot over the past few months, and the illustration style changed just as much with it.

When I decided I was going to illustrate the game myself, I didn't really know how to do it. I didn't have the money to pay artists for an entire card game, and simply using AI generated art or public domain imagery was something I didn't want for Kravestorm. I wanted something unique, more crafty, more indie. Something that probably wouldn't appeal to everybody, but that could actually feel like it belonged to this game.

The problem was that I had to figure out what that looked like while learning how to draw at the same time. The earlier concepts were much more cartoonish, brighter and simpler. At that point I was mostly happy whenever I managed to finish an illustration that looked remotely like what I had imagined in my head.

Then the redrawing started. Sometimes because a card had changed, sometimes because the illustration simply wasn't good enough anymore, and sometimes because a few months had passed and I could suddenly see problems I wasn't able to see before. It became pretty much a constant process of moving three steps forward and two steps back.

The image montage of this article puts some of the 2025 concepts directly next to their newer versions. They are still the same characters and ideas, but the style around them changed almost completely. The newer versions became darker, more detailed and more textured, and they started feeling much closer to the tone Kravestorm eventually developed.

It took me almost two years of drawing before I felt comfortable saying I had actually found a style for the game. That doesn't mean every illustration is perfect, or that the style will never change again. I'm still learning, and I expect future sets to keep evolving. But there is finally a direction that I can look at and recognize as Kravestorm.

Looking at the old and new versions side by side is probably the clearest way for me to see how much this part of the project changed. A lot of the early illustrations are awkward, and some of them are pretty bad, but they were still necessary to get here. The current style didn't appear because I planned it from the beginning. It slowly showed up after a lot of failed attempts, redrawing and iteration.

Reed Arsenhorn