It cannot have escaped your notice that we are currently LIVE on Kickstarter with Which Witch?! As I write we have smashed through our funding goal and 3 more stretch goals, so I’m about to announce a 4th and I’m so excited! 180 people so far have backed to the tune of £8839 to bring this project to completion - and there’s still just under 2 weeks to go. Closing out on Friday 13th (when else?) I know many of you reading this will have backed us already, but if you haven’t… maybe now? :pleading eyes: Joking… unless?

Now back to Nat to talk about the beautiful art of Which Witch some more:

Last time (Why is this witch in Which Witch?) I talked about how the witches in Which Witch? were chosen to try and match their myths and stories to their mechanics and abilities. This week, I’m going to let you in on a bit more flavour behind some of our witches, and talk specifically about how their visual designs came about. You can also check out How to commission a witch.

The designs for our witches come primarily from descriptions in their myths and legends, but pop-culture versions of characters are obviously an influence on us creators (even if only subconsciously).

A number of witches in the game I learned of through a game or comic, many others by falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes. For me, the Morrigan has two big pop culture versions.

Amazing as both of these are, they are not what I wanted for Which Witch?

Aesthetically, for her design, I wanted a figure that would work with the Nouveau illustration style the game was developing.

I wanted a depiction that fit the Celtic roots, that felt like it had an edge of brutality and darkness befitting a mage of battle, but with the beauty and power appropriate to her. She would be the queen of crows in game, and they needed to be a core part of her illustration.

Elyssa’s art achieves all this, and as one of the first two commissions, set the bar high for all our illustrations.

At one time I had also wanted her to be reflective of her association with the banshee ~ the spirit whose wails foretell a coming death. Morrigan herself has some power of portent, and in another world she could have filled Hecate’s role. Speaking of…

Hecate is a Titan in Greek myth, one powerful enough to rival the Olympians like Zeus. She is the goddess of all witches.

In lots of Witchy media (Buffy, Charmed, Sabrina) she is called upon to empower spells, though rarely actually depicted. This might well be because her classical interpretation often shows her with 3 faces/aspects. This trinity is prevalent within witchy stories. The past, present and future. The maiden, mother and crone. Hecate is all things, the guardian of the crossroads, the boundaries between all things.

She has many other associations, with the moon, with dogs, and is classically depicted with keys and torches. Most important though, she had to have a sense of intrinsic power. Hecate is our Witch of Witches, the power behind the name of the game. That’s a lot of potential inspirations for an artist, and then there’s the restriction that I wanted her prominent colours to be silver and black.

I adore Jaqueline’s piece. The three-fold depiction wrapped into the masks is elegant and lets her beauty and poise shine through into the illustration.

From Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga feels like the icon for traditional western witches. The archetypical crone, with hooked nose, warts, and ugly hair. Exactly the stranger in the woods parents warn children of, and certainly the witch most likely to stuff children into her oven.

More specific to her legend are the chicken-legged hut, and the pestle and mortar she uses to fly about, erasing her footprints behind her so you never even knew she was there.

Visually, there is a real challenge to presenting the ugliness of the fearsome character, versus the supernatural beauty and elegance of the nouveau illustrative style. This tension was a real challenge, and Kerri stepped up to the plate and knocked it out the park. Managing to get the chicken hut in frame at the same time as the flying pestle whilst fitting the card template was a real challenge.

Baba Yaga also wins the competition for most skulls in a single depiction (only just, Morrigan provides a tight race).

The Kitsune are many-tailed foxes from Japanese legend. They can change their appearance to that of a person, though often their tales¹ still give them away. I find it fascinating how the idea of foxes as magical tricksters exists in East Asian myth, European (with characters like Reynard), and even further west in the stories of Coyote (okay, yes that’s a different Canidae but it’s still cool).

It was from looking for legendary Japanese witches that I learned of Tamamo-no-Mae. She is a nine-tailed fox-spirit, a particularly malevolent one in many stories, who sought the throne of China. In various ancient ages she would appear as a beautiful woman and become a favoured lover of the Emperor, though never quite manage to take his title. She would then hide away for hundreds of years before coming back to try again. These concepts of trickster and disguise led to her ability to switch other people’s veiled witches ~ even the people who played them didn’t realise they were in disguise!

One aim of her depiction was to clearly keep in the source - her setting amongst the Sakura is a clear nod to Japan. To show her as a being of disguise and manipulation, she has the mask and fan to hide behind: the mask that is actually her true self. Her tails are there but take a moment to spot (as often seems to be the case in the tales of fox spirits). Finding the contrast and balance of cyan in an image so fundamentally pink is a challenge, but Kerri’s managed to produce an illustration that wonderfully uses it to pull the eye back to her face.

In Egyptian mythology Isis is the wife (and sister, but let’s skip that icky bit) of Osiris. When he is slain by his brother Set, she manages to reassemble his body and resurrect him. This is why in Which Witch? she has the power to return your discarded witches to your hand to play again.

Her classical depictions include an ankh and a staff of reeds. She is portrayed as a human figure in a red sheath dress. At times she wears a headdress like a throne, at others, a red sun disc between cow horns. Sometimes she has falcon wings under outstretched arms.

In game I wanted her to have a classic Egyptian appearance whilst maintaining a version of as many of these aspects as I could, without the illustration looking like a hieroglyph on Nefertiti’s tomb.

I took the idea of the headdress of cow horns and red sun disc, and turned it into the framing of a red sun behind her, with more minotaur-like horns. The ankhs and reeds moved from her hands to the feet of her throne, and whilst I dropped the falcon wings (from her tomb of Seti depiction), I tried to pull some of that feeling into her necklace.

Her pose I wanted to be one of control and authority. Hence the viewer’s eye level is below hers as she looks down upon you from a throne. Her position is one of relaxed authority.

Curious Lynx Games want to make games for everyone, no matter your gender, identity, orientation or race.

I am not an expert in this, because I grew up with plenty of white male characters to idolise, in basically all my comics, games and movies. However, not everyone shares my skin tone and gender. We have tried to create a set of witches from a diverse set of stories, with a diverse set of appearances. It’s not perfect - it would be impossible to represent everyone in just 13 illustrations, but even so some of the choices of character are still a little biased towards my experiences and heritage.

Hopefully you’re as excited as we were to see characters pulled from stories you’re not familiar with - I loved discovering Pincoya and Tamamo-no-Mae whilst searching for witches across the world.

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