“I think my favorite card so far is the Hectic Scribe. I think I see myself when I look at him.”
On a couch in a cramped Boston apartment — one of those glorified cubicles for recent grads where you just reach your kitchen sink from your bed — Eric Sabee and Justin Gary are playing Tekken 4. (Justin prefers Panda, for the record.) It’s 2002. Sabee, who works in a picture framing shop, and Gary, a law student, live down the hall from one another and spend a lot of free time hanging out in front of the Playstation.
Gary made a living playing Magic: The Gathering, a fact that amazed Sabee. Gary had played in the professional Magic circuit for years, capping his career with a victory in the 2002 Pro Tour. Gary won’t last much longer in law school. In a little while, he’s going to drop out, move to California, and start his own game company with other folks from the Magic scene.
Sabee graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in illustration, and like young artists since time immemorial, was struggling to catch a break into a career in the field. It would be a long time in coming. On the walls of that Boston are oil paintings that Sabee has been making over the past few months.
“I was frustrated with trying to break into illustration and getting nowhere,” Sabee told me a couple of weeks ago. “Someone convinced me to start painting scenes of Boston. People liked them alot. I wanted to emulate Van Gogh so there was a lot of big expressive marks, bright colors.”
One of the people that liked those paintings a lot was Justin Gary. “The first piece Justin ever bought from me was a scene of a restaurant on Brighton Avenue that was familiar to us both,” says Sabee. “He gave me his old big screen TV for it.”
Gary took a few more paintings with him when he left for California. And a few years later, when he started designing the game that would become Ascension, he knew which artist he wanted working on it.
One of Sabee’s oil landscapes, the sort that caught Justin Gary’s eye a decade ago.
For better or worse, gaming on mobile is chiefly characterised by how fast it moves: free and one-dollar games that dominate attention for a few days and are shelved when next week’s new flavour comes along. There’s very few games on iOS that have had the staying power of Ascension, the most accessible of the deck-building genre of games that have taken tabletop gaming by storm over the past few years. Three years since its release, the game still has a robust multiplayer community and receives regular updates with expansions and other content.
The reasons for Ascensions longevity are varied, of course: it’s an easy game to learn with a considerable skill ceiling to master. It rides the coattails of the popularity of its tabletop forbearer, which Justin Gary’s Stone Blade Entertainment continues to support. The app itself is a product of Playdek, one of the most respected mobile games studios. But some of that success has to be down to Ascension’s one-of-a-kind art style.
Ascension’s look bucks every aesthetic trend in gaming. There’s no visible pixels and no wild-haired anime heroes, but there is instead a hallucinogenic world of dwarven mechanical animists, bottled spirits wielded by wild-haired cultists, and a huge pantheon of ethereal plant goddesses and soul-devouring demons. Ascension looks like a game that was carved into a walrus tusk and unearthed by archeologists. Sabee’s style is perhaps divisive, but instantly recognisable and completely unique.
When Justin Gary called his old Tekken sparring partner in 2008 to tell him about the new game he was making, Sabee was also in California, working as a playground designer for a construction company in the Bay Area about a day’s drive north of where Gary had set up shop outside of San Diego. “[The project] didn’t even have a name yet,” Sabee says. “I think they were calling it Rune Scroll or something.
An example of the ballpoint-and-masking-tape style Sabee was working in when he made the first Ascension card set.
“Justin had a basic idea of what he wanted. Four factions and monsters. He had a bunch of descriptive words for them but they were really loose ideas. I started sketching. Like crazy. At the time I was just using ballpoint pen and masking tape. It was kinda my thing for a little bit.”
Working with art director Geordie Tait, Sabee brought the original four factions of Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (Mechana, Void, Lifebound, and Enlighted) to life. “[Tait] gave me a lot of room for interpreting his descriptions. If I didn’t think something was working I’d send him what I thought it should look like. He would give me feedback whether he love or hated it and before long we had the basic set.”
The cards had a muted color palette and had been worked to look weathered, as though they had been found in the titular Chronicle. Gary brought Sabee’s first illustrations to a convention, where fans told him that the designs were too drab. Sabee responded by brightening the color palette, and the result was the cards that were printed in Ascension’s core set when it was released as a tabletop game in 2010.
While the game proved an unqualified hit, Sabee’s card designs proved less universally appealing. “There were a lot of mixed reviews about the art for the first set,” Sabee says. “When Justin said he was ready for illustrations for the second set Return of the Fallen I wanted to do something really special.” Sabee’s new direction would be towards an unusual medium that he’d learned in a summer art program at Savannah College of Art and Design when he was 15 years old: scratchboard.
Card art from a later Ascension set, showing Sabee’s scratchboard with Photoshop colouring technique.
Scratchboard is an artistic medium that calls for a unique technique. A piece of stiff cardboard is covered with successive layers of white clay and black ink. By scraping off the ink with a tool (“I usually use an exacto blade”), the white underneath is revealed. Scratchboard arose alongside the popularity of mass-printed newspapers and magazines in the 19th century — it could be copied for publication with much greater fidelity than wood-engraved illustrations. “Scratchboard was like you were creating the light in the drawing,” Sabee tells me. “Instead of drawing the lines and the shadow in I could carve out the light.”
Inspired by printmakers and engravers like Barry Moser, Mark Summers, and Albrecht Durer, Sabee had taken to scratchboard with a passion in high school, and now years later he knew it was the unique style he could use to make Return of the Fallen‘s cards unforgettable.
Sabee made all of Return of the Fallen’s cards in scratchboard, engraving a master for each card which he would scan in and then color in Photoshop. Sabee had originally gotten Justin Gary’s attention with his bold and colourful oil landscapes, and his style explodes through the scratchboard. Look at other artists using that medium and you’ll see fine, intricate, mathematically precise work. Sabee’s scratchboard Ascension cards almost vibrate, conveying energy and movement and mystery. They’re fireworks made from clay. The style proved popular and each of Ascension’s five subsequent card sets have been styled the same way.
“If I had to pick a favorite? I’d pick the Mechana. They have so much personality and humor. I could do a whole game just about the Mechana. Also I come from a family of engineers.”
Sabee is definitely not designing playgrounds anymore. He’s a full-time freelance illustrator, and besides the work he does for Stone Blade, he also works for clients like Anchor Brewing and various California wineries creating bottle labels. He isn’t bored of Ascension yet, either. “I just finished the illustrations for another installment. And I think they are going to surprise a lot of people. It’s a lot different from the other sets art wise.”
Does he still experiment with new mediums? “I still like oil paints a lot and hope to keep doing some later. Maybe more landscapes. Not Boston ones, though.”
