Studio

I did not set out to draw games. I trained as a printmaker, spent two years pulling other people's editions in a workshop off Krakowska Street, and expected to keep doing that until the workshop closed, which it did in 2016. A friend rang the following spring and asked whether I could do forty small icons for a canal game in three weeks. I said yes without knowing what a component icon was.

Nine years later I have thirty-one published titles behind me and I still think like a printmaker. Flat shapes first. Decide the whole image before you decide the color. Assume the press will take away half your subtlety and paint the half that survives.

The studio is one room on the first floor of a building on Józefa Street, above a bookbinder who has never played a board game and asks me every few months whether I am still doing the little cards. There is a north window, a scarred table, a shelf of thirty-one boxes I am quietly proud of, and a shoebox of every cover rough that got rejected, filed by the game that did not want it. I take the shoebox to conventions. It is more useful than the boxes.

I work on one game at a time. It makes the calendar short and the answer to most enquiries a date rather than a yes, but it is the only way I know to keep a hundred cards looking like one hand made them.