Introduction

Welcome to the Zeo Genesis Box Art Showcase, where we do a deep dive on the amazing artwork splashed across our box sets!

This series focuses on our new faction, the Orgh! Possessing advanced technology, vast intelligence, and an intense drive to conquer and survive, Orgh warbands consist of the dominant, lizard-like Orgh species and their many servitor species, who have become bound to the Orgh through history or conquest.

We gave concept and key artist Graey Erb the mic to talk about how he went about capturing the ferocity and cunning of the Orgh in his incredibly detailed full-color pieces.

What Makes a Good Piece of Box Art?

Graey Erb: Box art needs to communicate the contents of the box set, tell a story to draw in the viewer, help hint at the larger setting, and have a level of polish and consistency with the rest of the range to make it easily identifiable as being Zeo Genesis!

Every piece starts as a project brief from the Art Director (in this case, Andy Hepworth), then goes through a round of thumbnailing and sketches from myself to dial in on a direction for the piece. Then begins the longer process of going back and forth with revisions before finishing it all off with a rendering pass.

Thumbnail Sketches

From the brief, I knew that this box set was going to contain a pair of the lightest-armored Neophids as well as a trio of rifle-wielding Gazeki, and that one of the Neophids should be posed over a downed Rakke similarly to one of the poses contained in the box, but after some back and forth we agreed that a potential total of six characters would create a pretty busy scene, so one of the Neophids was benched for readability’s sake. 

With all that figured out, my next step is always to do a bunch of tiny thumbnail sketches on paper (often no more than an inch or so square) to try as many ideas as I can and make sure that the compositions read well even when very small, then take the best of those and do simple black-and-white value roughs digitally to send over to Andy for approval. In this case, we felt that option 2 was the clear winner, so that one got the greenlight!

Rough Colors

Next, I take the approved sketch and drop it straight into a larger template file I use for all the box covers and begin slapping in basic color! Since this was going to be a pretty dark piece, I wanted to get the brightest light sources and darkest areas established quickly so that I could balance everything out as I went. This is also the stage that I begin cleaning up the linework and making sure things like perspective and scale are all fixed from the mess that often happens in that initial sketch stage.

Final Art

The black swathe of background felt too murky, so instead it got switched out for a view of a planet in parent orbit with some Orgh ships hanging out in the void above, barely able to be made out, but aside from that, most of the work was just inking, coloring and doing light effects on all the characters and background and then doing paintover layers to adjust the light and add all the fun special effects. About a week after sketch approval, we have a final pass on the box cover!