As part of my WAP year I did one style study, Ken Sugimori’s Pokemon trainers. This year I’m going to attempt to do a style study every month to push me out of my comfort zone and also to learn to break down what I’m looking at when it comes to art pieces.

Kyle Ferrin was an easy first choice as he has both a very distinct style that’s almost instantly recognizable to me and it’s extremely cute. For this study I’m focusing mostly on his visual style of the boardgame Root and not his whole portfolio but he is pretty consistent in some regards.

Before jumping in I wanted to identify the main things I wanted to learn or understand in this particular study:

• Ink work: Kyle uses blank ink for a lot of shadows, much more than I would usually
• Shapes: We’re gonna be looking at a lot of little critters, how does he keep them recognizable?
• Colours: The work in Root feels extremely vibrant while still natural.
• Backgrounds: Kyle doesn’t do a lot of backgrounds but does have a few techniques he repeats.

Studies are going to break down differently from my WAP weeks, and may even differ from artist to artist. I made a 5 day plan for this one and mostly managed to stick to it.

Day 1 - Research and techniques​

Root and Kyle are, thankfully, both very popular. An added bonus is that Kyle has some recorded streams of his full art process. This makes understanding his workflow pretty easy as you can watch him do it in real time. I was even able to find 2 interviews he did where he talks about art which led to a few gems that helped me approach this study week.

Interview 1: Kyle Ferrin: Art in Board Games #31

Interview 2: Interview with Kyle Ferrin, Artist on Root! (Original website seems broken)

It was in the images chosen for the More Games Please interview that I noticed the bush and tree techniques. So on day one I tried to recreate those techniques digitally. I then took my old goblin drawing and did an inking pass on it to practice where Kyle would put harder shadows, using this collection of skeleton warriors as examples to reference.

I then spent some time with the Root cover image and a collection of Kyle goblins. I love how expressive his characters are and I wanted to look more closely at Root character proportions.

Day 2 - First attempt at the style​

Feeling pretty excited by what I learned in day 1 I jumped into creating a Root fanart piece. I wanted to draw critters that aren’t as common in Root so I chose pigeon and squirrel. Kyle has done a few squirrels but I have to say they aren’t my favourite designs of his.

I’m happy with a lot of this piece but there are a few areas that stand out for improvement. Mostly the building. There aren’t many full buildings in the Root art so I didn’t have much to use as a reference. Because of that I kind of just floundered and used it to fill space. I also could have played with more line/ink colour variations instead of just black and white.

Day 3 - Workflow replication​

To see Kyle’s workflow in action I watched his live stream from three months ago: Leder Games | Art Stream with Kyle Ferrin!

Which seems to breakdown to:

1. Sketch
2. Ink
3. Scan
4. Digital colours

So I would do the same. Instead of adding difficulty of coming up with a piece from scratch I decided to recreate a piece of Root art. I wanted something with a little bit of background as well as a character so I went with this raccoon behind a log piece.

(This is an original Root piece.)

I did a sketch and then tested my pens because it’s been a long time since I inked anything by hand. Most of what I own are Microns which didn’t feel right for this, they are too small and precise. So I chose my pens that had more of a brush tip for larger areas.

I don’t have a scanner so I had to rely on trying to get a good phone photo. It came out pretty decent after some level corrections in CSP but also felt like there were a lot of strange artifacts like red pixels and blurring in the photo.

I then colour picked from the original and tried out some digital watercolour brushes to get that textured look that Kyle gets. In the video Kyle shares the limited Root colour palette that he uses for all the board game pieces. And in one of the interviews he said:

“Most of the color pallet for the board art in Root is sampled from autumn foliage photography.”

So I also felt comfortable deviating a little from the source image as long as I kept the autumn colours in mind.

My own raccoon came out a little too small but I’m happy with the piece overall. I liked working with the water colour brushes as they keep the large colour areas interesting without even doing a shading pass. I did try taking some notes on areas of improvement.

You can see them side by side here:

Day 4 - Watercolours​

For day 4 I took it easy a bit by doing a physical watercolour pass on the inks I did previously. Mostly because I enjoy working with watercolours even if I’m not very skilled at them. Unfortunately my pens weren’t waterproof…

Parts of it went okay while others got out of control rather quickly. But it was fun to do it physically after already doing the piece digitally.

Day 5 - New unique piece in the style​

For the last day I wanted to draw something new again. I did some thumbnailing and chose the parts of the style I definitely wanted to incorporate.

While most of the art for Root is small cards and mostly individual character pieces, I’ve been in full “scene” mode from working on the visual novel. So a background and multiple characters. Basically gave myself hard mode for the final. But I really enjoyed the ways of doing forest plants, I wanted to keep doing those.

I also didn’t let myself colour pick from an image and instead eye balled the colours to see how far off I would be. I don’t think any of the Root pieces do much foreground background stuff but I did darker a whole section to create some depth to the image. Trying to push the style a bit and also just bring in my own techniques for creating a scene.

I’m pretty happy with the piece! Something I learned while working on it, while watching another Root art stream, was that Kyle works at very small sizes. He showed off the pens he used and it made me realize I’ve just been super over sizing everything. When I went to use my own pens my thoughts were “these are too small” when it turns out they were way too big. I didn’t imagine that he was working at such a small scale, but it makes filling in blacks so much easier when you are fighting to fill a whole page. Due to working at a larger size I also end up with a lot of empty space. Most of the Root pieces don't have much sky and I probably shouldn't have filled in more of the background with larger grasses and more trees.

Something learned from the interviews is that the colour palette and line work style for Root is chosen with a reason; communicating game state. The art pieces are meant to be easy to parse and understand at a glance thanks to high contrast, be that between lines, colours, or shapes. Something that I went against by darkening the foreground. I have the freedom of not drawing this fanart for a game but it's extremely interesting to learn why certain creative desicions are made for particular settings.

Resources​

I’m not the only person doing Kyle Ferrin or Root studies. I found one video on YouTube of another artist doing their best to replicate the style:

The artist goes for a full digital approach which is what I did in my first attempt as well. I think it’s okay for a single character but the larger Root scenes with backgrounds and heavier inking feel like they really need a physical ink brush to capture the style properly.

I also found another person’s Root fanart over on Reddit that I really liked: I tried to recreate the Root artstyle!. Their work also feels fully digital but I wasn’t able to find any active website or socials for them.

Conclusion​

I feel like this was a very promising first style study. I’m happy with the pieces I produced for it and there are tricks here that I can see myself relying on to create more stylized backgrounds. It was a fun kind of investigation to really watch someone work and try to analyses their pieces. I’d also like to be able to draw my own lovable little guys but I think I still have more practice in that area to do. Downside to this study, I now want to buy all the Root games...

Find Kyle’s work at:

• His Instagram
• His store
• Check out other games Kyle has worked on at Leder Games.

I’ve been very sick all this week so I might take it easy next week with a more classic WAP or even a week of focusing on some Littos bits and pieces.

Going into the final week, I’ve done my (very likely) final pull request for art assets. Have done a few playthroughs of the game, hunting down any bugs. Between how hard we worked early in the month and our success at avoiding too much scope creep, we’re hoping to submit the game in the next day or two with a day to spare before the deadline.

It’s time for the week 3 summary. That’s 21 days of working on our game non-stop. Neither of us has taken a full day off since we started, doing probably 7-10 hours of work a day each (well, a little less for me on the days I go to my paying job). We’re still progressing at a nice pace but with more than half the month gone the to-do list feels a little scarier with each passing day.

The assets list increases a little every week. Last week there were 77 needed assets, this week ending at 82. Some of those are ‘nice-to-haves’ which I’m going to start tracking as stretch goals so they don’t contribute to the overall number necessary for launch.

14 days in, so it’s time for another progress report on Love in the Time of Spellphage.

Not a huge change in the asset tracker as I wrapped up most of the small part and have spent the last 5 days in focused background mode.

New year new projects, starting with the Sealed With a Kiss game jam. My wife and I started work on the project bright and early on January first. With just a few days of vacation left I wanted to get as many assets done as I could before returning to work on Monday. Which has led to creating more art in a few days than any period last year.

The speed won’t last though. I got through most of the character art but now I’m mostly left with backgrounds and I probably won’t be able to get through more than one of those every few days. So far 5-8 hours seems like the average time they requires. But we’ll see how the next week goes, for now, it’s recap time.

When I first launched into this goal of practicing art in a focused fashion every week I wasn’t sure I’d be able to maintain it. I also wasn’t sure if it was going to be a practice that would lead to noticeable improvements. Just drawing every day isn’t enough to keep getting better, so I was really relying on the focused methodology of practice flow to pay off.

Given my last 2 weeks of revisits, my new found near comfort drawing hands, and lack of fear of the blank page, I feel like it has. I did end up drawing mostly animals as a comfort zone, but then expanded my focus halfway through the year to include anatomy weeks to make sure I was still continuing to work on the fundamentals. Then in the last few months I tried to add the goal of completing a finished piece once a month as well. Easily making it my most productive art year in a decade.

Cara, the social media platform for artists, took off this year. I didn’t post all my finished work there but almost all these pieces are from this year:

I was able to stick to my 1 book a month goal this year, squeezing in 2 extras. This was my first year of really seriously using the ebook library app, Libby, since I was able to get it to finally sync with my Kobo. This makes for really random book consumption as what you’re reading at any time completely depends on when holds come in. But it also cutely led to me and my wife reading a lot of the same books.

In the last few years I’ve had a bit of focus to my book selection. For a while I wanted to wrap up all the series I had started. And then for a few years I had a growing number of water focused novels I wanted to read. I no longer have any large goals like that and am actually out there trying to find new authors to follow or catch up on. With the death of Twitter I no longer follow as many writers and readers so my to-read list hasn’t been growing all that quickly. The only serious source I go to for new stuff is K. A. Doore’s yearly roundup of Queer Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy Books. I’m hoping library access will help make discovery easier going forward, but it’s a real shame how barely usable Libby is. An insult to app designers and librarians everywhere.

But on to the books. I tried writing this blog post a few times but found it was hard to talk about each one. So here are my top 3 and also my scoring (out of 3) for the rest.

WAP 40, the final WAP of 2024!

This is another week of revisiting animal subjects of the last year. I even tried to embrace slightly more cartoony looks for them. Really kind of trying to put my brain on auto-pilot and seeing what comes out. I went and included side by sides for each day as I realized that seeing the comparison was really what I was doing these 2 weeks for.

Day 1 - Sea turtles​

Last year I tried to break games down into what I loved and what was okay. This year I’m going to try organizing things a little differently. I liked a lot of games this year. Made a dent in my backlog, played some of the top regarded games of the year, and a lot of them were hits with me. So this will probably read like a long list of game recommendations.

Unlike your typical 'Best Of' list, I’m starting with my top games of the year instead of saving them for the end. Why make the people wait. Or read.

Cobalt Core was a very early game in the year for me. It came out in November 2023 so I wasn’t too far from release when I picked it up. It’s a deck builder disguised as a ship builder roguelike. I was almost turned off of it once I realized how many playthroughs were needed to unlock the full ending but the gameplay kept bringing me back. And eventually I found a rather consistent ship build that got me wins 70% of the time. The art is rather cutesy but I thought it had great humour and writing.

Probably don’t need to say much about the Elden Ring DLC since I had put Elden Ring in my top games last year. But for me I think I got a more true Elden Ring experience in the DLC than I did in the main game. I had watched my wife play through Elden Ring before I really got hooked so there wasn’t much mystery for me and I kind of just focused on the main line and one build. In the DLC I explored (nearly) every nook and cranny, going for a near completionist run without really trying. Just felt fully In It. People still complain about the DLC’s use of Shadowseeds as necessary for progressing in the game power-wise but I find their complaints unjustified and thought it was actually a clever way to reward exploration and not rushing through. While also not taking away your powers since many people were coming into the DLC after beating the main game.

Return of the Obra Dinn was one that has been on my to-play list since it came out. But I didn’t love the visual style so I hesitated. Wanting to play more games on my Switch this year because I could then play games in the bath, I finally got it. And then played it for nearly 6 hours straight. Excellent mystery design, such a unique progression, so much UI design making it playable. Instantly became a game I encourage everyone to play.

Puzzlers​

So I said I was going to try to break things down a little differently. Mostly because there have been so many good games this year but they’ve all been very different styles. Obra Dinn wasn’t my first puzzle game of the year, I started with Cocoon, one of the top games from 2023. I loved how straightforward Cocoon was, how it made you feel just clever enough. While also giving you very minimal storytelling, you mostly went on vibes. I also like to describe it as a game for people who want to ponder over some orbs.

Animal Well was a more search-action platform puzzler. Another really unique style, interesting game play, but the extensive puzzles going levels deep was too much for me. I still think the game is great and I recommend it for people and tell them it feels good even just reaching the first credits. But I would have loved to have the experience of playing it at the same time as friends and sharing discoveries and maybe trying to figure out some of the more obtuse secrets.

Another one from the backlog was Chants of Sennaar. I don’t feel like this game ever got much hype but it was talked about on a gaming podcast I listen to and I was rather taken with the art style when I looked it up. The central game mechanic is deciphering languages used by different castes in a society so that you can try to figure out what’s going on. It has a similar game feel as Obra Dinn, where you are dragging and dropping your answers to the puzzles into menu slots. Which honestly, is probably where they got the design idea from and where the next game, The Case of the Golden Idol, likely got inspiration from too.

Golden Idol is a series of scenes, each containing mysteries you piece together through a bit of point and click investigating. It was really fun, and deployed a hint system that was enough to help me with a puzzle whenever I got stuck. I really like that as a mechanic because even though every game has been walkthrough to death online, it’s really nice to not pick up your phone and look for help and just be able to stay in the game.

I would honestly recommend all these games, I felt like they were all unique and all offered something a little different.

Gatchas​

While Genshin Impact is still my main gatcha game (I still play nearly every day), I tested the waters of a few others this year.

Zenless Zone Zero is the newest Mihoyo game, one I was pretty excited for after years of small teases. I ended up only playing for 2 days before deciding it wasn’t really for me. I liked the character design, I liked the combat, but the general execution of being more locked into quests after the open world freedom of Genshin felt very restrictive. But I also knew it would want as much time as Genshin does and it’s hard to balance multiple huge games like that at the same time.

For a little over a month my wife and I played AFK Journey. This was also a time sink but it was when I wanted to get off Twitter so I was trying to get into the habit of opening games on my phone instead of opening brain numbing apps. It was fun while it lasted but didn’t have the staying power of Genshin to keep us coming back.

There are two gatchas that are staying a little better. Pokemon TCG Pocket, a game that’s mostly focused on giving you that “pulls” feeling. As it does give you 2 pulls every day without you having to do anything besides login. If this wasn’t such a strong IP I don’t think this game would last but it takes minimal time commitment and I love looking at Pokemon.

The other is Infinity Nikki which I thought I’d play for a week and then bounce but I’m now on week 3 or so and have basically embraced it as my killing time while tired game while waiting for the next big Genshin content drop. Infinity Nikki is very unique in its focus on fashion and story over combat, and I do love playing dress-up. But I will be surprised if I stick with this game longer than winter break.

Not good enough at​

I consider myself pretty good at video games. I have what I consider decent reflexes and hand eye coordination for my age, enjoy puzzle solving and also believe in having to put the time in to get good at something. So I find it rare that I bounce off a game because I’m just not getting it. But it happened twice this year.

One was for Pacific Drive, a game I was very excited about because I loved some of its early trailers. But after multiple failed journeys in my car, and having to re-do missions over and over again, I just lost motivation. I felt like I was missing a key understanding for being able to get through even early missions. I saw some other people online with a similar complaint, and they were mostly told to “get good”. Others suggested that there were a few difficulty settings that can be changed. So if I do ever return to this I’d probably turn those on and try to enjoy the mystery of the world more.

Rollderdrome was the other game I put down. I’d heard lots of good things about it and was super intrigued by the game player and weird setting, but I didn’t love the game feel. And the fact that you just went match to match without much going on between challenges meant I didn’t have much to latch onto besides the game play.

The rest​

Okay I tried being organized but there are only a few left and they don’t really fit in a nice category.

Dave the Diver, one of last year's huge breakouts. I had a lot of fun with this and was blown away by the pixel art. I put a lot of time into it even though it got rather repetitive and honestly killing fish over and over again didn’t feel great. But it had such addictive pacing.

Night in the Woods was my only VN-esque game this year. A famously beloved indie darling that is very well executed and had a twist I didn’t see coming. It was also a nice length with good writing overall. Which is why it often came up in my game circles since I spend a lot of time talking about storytelling and writing in games. So I knew I had to get to this one eventually and I’m happy I finally did.

And I replayed Hades. I had a strong urge to start playing early access Hades 2 but when trying to balance how much time you play video games versus other things I didn’t want to put 30 hours into Hades 2 knowing I would likely put in those same 30 hours on the full release. So I will keep trying to avoid any spoilers for Hades 2 and just hope that it gets a full release soon.

This feels a bit like a ridiculous amount of games to play in a year, but most of them were nice, reasonably sized experiences. The puzzlers were in the 5-12 hours of gameplayer area. Dave the Diver and Elden Ring were probably the only games I put in over 30 hours. I’ve just really come to enjoy a video game that I can start playing on a Friday evening and wrap it up by Sunday evening. Just a nice weekend experience.

I do have a list of games I’d like to play in 2025 and I think most should also be in the smaller game category. Which does make me curious for what huge game will be able to grab me next, as there’s nothing on my radar for releases in 2025 that seems like a contender. Unless Hades 2 does a surprise drop...

For these last 2 WAP weeks, I decided to change it up. For each of the days I would revisit one of the themes I had done in the previous 38 WAPs. I didn’t want this to be extra extra hard mode or anything, I just wanted to see how much of what I took out of those weeks stuck around. So I let myself re-read the original blog post and scroll through the Pintrest page of images before I settled in to do some drawing.

Day 1 - Squirrels​

Still love squirrels, happy to revisit them. They were my very first WAP.

Then compare the day 5 from squirrel week to this iteration 50 weeks later.