This illustration made my husband squirm, but anyone who has hiked the U.P. knows this little guys well. I know ticks are parasites, but I actually find their seemingly random symmetrical marking patterns very beautiful. Work on this project has slowed as I continue to hunt for paying freelance illustration work. But the board game, Evolve!, is still on track for production, so I’ll keep plugging away!

This is a very exciting month! Evolve!, the game that I’ve devoted my 100-Day Project to illustrating, did very well in the Champaign-Urbana Design Organization’s yearly game design contest. This resource and evolution game took first place in the Education category for its scientifically accurate content and modeling, and second in the Innovation of Game Play category. My husband, Keith, and I together make up the Chimeric Creations game design team that created Evolve! With this success under our belts, we hope to Kick-Start Evolve! in the coming year. Here’s a picture of the prototype we entered in the competition.

It’s finally snowing in Illinois! This makes me think wistfully of the northern woods and bogs. One of the mammals on my list to illustrate for the game Evolve! happened to be the gray wolf, Canis lupis. I doubt I’ll see any wolf prints in the snow this far south, but one can always hope.

This card illustration came together in a single sitting. I’m really excited that this design work for the evolution and systems game Evolve! is giving me a chance to draw new animals. The red-billed oxpecker is a showy African native that moves with the migrating herds of ungulates. It lives off the parasites and insects associated with large grazers such as zebra and wildebeest.

This challenge is off to a slow start art-wise, but it’s feeling pretty good overall. This little guy made it into the card design for the new evolutionary resource game Evolve! More to come as other projects move aside.