Kelly knew that he wanted Brutus to be the first character everyone saw, considering he was the one who betrayed Caesar in the first place. I knew he had to look menacing - this is a game of assassination, after all.

 

 

Kickstarter backers were allowed to pick from a pool of designs for the character cards to determine the final deisgns. Pretty much all of the backers picked design D, which was my favorite anyways.

Our campaign was an enormous success, and I got rolling on the designs as soon as we crossed over our goal amount. Luckily I had several months to refine my initial decisions, and made some new art direction choices that really enhanced the final product.

At first I was going to keep the simulated colored pencil / acrylic on gessoed board look from the first version of Brutus for the rest of the artwork, but it quickly became evident that I needed to find a more economic approach.

This change in approach was inspired by the epic movie posters for biblical movies in the 50's and 60's. The "painted" style allowed for much greater speed and flexibility, and really solidified the aesthetic for the game.

Both the Caesar and Cleopatra art served as gift prints for Kickstarter backers who donated over a certain amount. Since the two pieces would constantly be paired together, I needed something that would be consistent with the Caesar art, but have contrasting qualities - in this case, seductive and threatening. Whereas Caesar's likeness was based on no one in particular, Kelly's wife Cathy requested that she serve as the basis for our Egyptian queen.

Our top-tier backers were rewarded by having their likenesses transformed into the ancient Roman leaders on each card. This produced its own set of challenges, but luckily my request for "selfies" from each of them was enough to fulfill my need for decent reference photos.

After months and months of painting, designing, nipping, tucking, tweaking, and twerking (?), the final pieces fell into place and the game went into production in July of 2014.