Board game illustration
The picture on the box.
Box covers, card art, boards and component icon sets, painted in gouache and colored pencil on toned paper in a first-floor studio in Kraków. Thirty-one published titles since 2017, and every one of them had to survive being shrunk to the size of a card.
Fenlight, Krzemień Press, 2026. Box cover, gouache and colored pencil on toned paper.
Every game with my name in it
Fourteen of the thirty-one, newest first. What I drew for each one is on the second line, because that is the part a publisher actually needs.
Fenlight
Krzemień PressBox cover · 96 card illustrations · 2 player boards
The most recent one, and the one I would show first
Salt Wake
Northgate Games24 card illustrations · box back
Expansion to The Salt Roads
The Salt Roads
Northgate GamesBox cover · 32 caravan cards · route board
Marrow and Thorn
Krzemień PressBox cover · 40 creature cards · board · 6 player boards
Shortlisted, the Vistula Prize 2026
Ostrich Court
Pelican & HareBox cover · 54 courtier cards · terrace board
Beacon Hollow
Northgate GamesBoard · box cover · 5 player boards · 18 event cards
The Quiet Orchard
Pelican & Hare80 card illustrations · box cover · box interior
In print in four languages
Tenfold
Studio WolnaBox cover · 60 stamped icons · score track
Coldwater Bell
Rookery EditionsBox cover · 12 location cards · board inset
Hearthway
Krzemień PressBox cover · spine · 30 route cards
Ninefold Wood
Studio WolnaBoard · box cover · 24 hazard cards
Small Hours
Bell & Barrow44 card illustrations
A Murmur of Cranes
Rookery EditionsBox cover · 60 card illustrations · box interior
Lantern and Lock
Pelican & HareBox cover · 40 component icons · rulebook spots
The first one
31
Published titles
11
Publishers
1,340
Card illustrations
9
Languages in print
Six covers, uncropped
The most recent boxes, shown as the finished artwork, before the title and the publisher's logo went over the top of it.
Marrow and Thorn
The Salt Roads
Fenlight
Tenfold
Beacon Hollow
Ostrich Court
A first-floor studio in Kazimierz
Nine years in, I still start every cover the same way: four thumbnails at postcard size, in pencil, before anyone has said a word about color.
I trained as a printmaker and came to games sideways, through a friend who needed forty icons in three weeks and could pay in beer. Everything I do still carries the printmaker's habit of settling the whole image in flat shapes first and only then working out what color it is.
I paint in gouache and colored pencil on toned paper at roughly twice print size, and finish digitally. The paper matters more than it should. A mid-tone ground means I am always painting toward the light instead of away from it, and it keeps the darks from going dead.
What I am actually paid for is legibility. A cover has to work as a 20mm thumbnail on a store page, as a 70mm box face on a crowded shelf and as a 300mm print on a convention banner, and those are three different pictures unless you plan for it.
So I test small, early and often. If a rough survives being printed at postage-stamp size and pinned across the room, it goes forward. If it does not, it goes in the shoebox with the rest of them.
A cover is not the best picture you can paint. It is the picture that survives being shrunk.
Four things I get asked for
All four are quoted the same way: a fixed fee against a fixed scope, half up front, three rounds of changes inside it.
Box covers
What does someone see from three feet away?
One painted cover, delivered as a layered file with the type area kept clear, plus a 20mm thumbnail test print of the same image so you can check it before it reaches the printer.
Card art
Will a player tell these two apart across the table?
Runs of twenty to a hundred card illustrations on one shared paper ground, so the deck stays related. I paint silhouettes first and color last, and every card is tested at 40mm before it is finished.
Boards and maps
Does the space explain the rules on its own?
Painted boards and route maps built as pictures rather than diagrams, with the mechanical grid laid over the landscape once the landscape works. I work directly with your developer from the first sketch.
Component icons
Does it still read stamped on wood at 9mm?
Icon sets of twenty to sixty marks, drawn at final size from the first pass and tested in one flat color. If a mark cannot survive a single-color stamp, it does not ship.
What art directors say
Tell me what the game is about.
A paragraph is enough to start with. I answer everything within two working days, and I will say so straight away if the schedule does not work.