Mythology Matching Game

Growing up, I was a fanatic for board games to the point of annoyance to the rest of my family. My favorite games were the ones where you could take the characters and play with them outside of them game, e.g. Clue, Candy Land, and the more obscure Arthur Goes to the Library. This is probably why I was so ecstatic to make the illustrations for Mythology Matching—a board game completely comprised of characters. Six-year-old me would’ve been obsessed with this game!

How I got connected to the project and started working with The Classical Workshop honestly felt like divine intervention. While mindlessly scrolling Instagram one day, an ad popped up looking for illustrators. Usually ads like this at best lead to crickets. But I found myself submitting a portfolio anyways, because why the heck not. Robert, the creator of The Classical Workshop, soon reached out with the dream project, create a set of 24 illustrations featuring Greek gods, heroes, and creatures for a matching game. He wanted accurate representations but other than that I was given complete creative freedom. I was already a fan of Greek mythology thanks to Disney’s Hercules (I wanted to be Meg so bad! “I’m a damsel, I’m in distress, I can handle this.”) and other more recent media like Hadestown and Lore Olympus had me captivated. So it’s safe to say, I was in.

Robert supplied me with a list of figures to draw so the hard work of narrowing down all of Greek mythology to 24 characters was already done for me. I started by compiling reference photos of each figure. Since we wanted these to be in line with how they were historically portrayed, I tried to find images of classic sculptures for my main references. I was specifically looking at how their clothes were commonly portrayed and common stances they’re seen in.

The sketches came together pretty quickly from there. I didn’t want too much detail since the tiles are only a couple of inches wide and they should be easily distinguishable to kids.

Determining the color palette was a much trickier bit. I knew I wanted the colors to be bold and eye-catching to engage kids quickly but from there I was stumped. I also struggled to decide how much detail should be in the background. I started several versions of Artemis (she’s my favorite of the gods) but I could not get excited about anything I was producing. The background either felt unfinished or sloppy and the colors felt muddy like they were melting into each other.

When I get frustrated with an image, the best thing to do is drop it and move on to something else. I figured Artemis might be too tricky of a piece to start with since she has both a deer and bow with her and she needed a moon in the background. Atalanta seemed a bit more simple since she only needs an apple and her background could simply be trees and grass. Before diving into Atalanta, I did a little regrouping first. I popped onto the website Coolors to play with some color palettes and pulled together a handful I really liked. I used those colors to loosely scribble over the sketch to get a feel for how to lay out the colors without them getting muddy. This scribbly mess was what finally got me excited. I made Atalanta’s tile and fell in love with how the colors played off of each other.

With the colors locked in, it was just a matter of filling in the rest of the sketches. For each new figure, I would try a couple variations of scribbly coloring to make sure I didn’t end up with muddy colors again. As I completed each tile, I added them to a giant sheet to make sure the color hierarchies weren’t too similar to the rest since they need to be easily distinguishable. Looking at them now as one big group makes me so giddy. They each have their own little personality and I can’t wait to see which character becomes the favorite for you!

You can find the game here along with some free coloring sheets!