Elaine Ryan has once again stunned us with her beautiful stained-glass interpretations of the classic book by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers™. Join us as we chat through her artistic process, her love of The Lord of the Rings™, and her present and future successes.
First and foremost, congratulations on the success of the first game in the series, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring™ Trick-Taking Game! The art is a frequent talking point with just how beautiful it is! Have there been any stand-out moments from the game’s release for you?
Thank you!! The success of the game has been an absolutely surreal experience. The predominantly warm reception to the card art made me let out an unexpected exhale I didn’t know I had been holding! I don’t know how to be more grateful for the positive reception of art that is so close to my instinctive sketchbook style. More than anything, I feel like it’s a unique and cherishable experience to be a part of a board game that people purposefully set aside their limited time to play and enjoy. Genuinely, I want to send out a huge thank you to everyone who has reviewed the game and shared their thoughts!
I have had a few delightful standout moments since the release, as I have been selling the games at my small artist alley table at a few conventions. My all-time favorite was when a fan of the game told me about a debate that started around their table regarding The Balrog card. Did it have wings or not? I must have cackled in sheer delight, because that was my absolute goal with that card: I had drawn the illustration with wings and then painted and obfuscated them as if they weren’t there. I love being a part of this fandom, and being able to stoke the fires of a 50-year-old debate.
This is the second installment of The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking series, The Two Towers. Do you have a favorite moment from the second book you were most excited to create?
This feels like it should be a more difficult question to answer because there were so many parts of the story I was excited to depict but one really did stand out for me over others: Designing Shelob!
I enjoy designing monsters almost as much as I enjoy drawing elegant elves, so it was a real treat to design the daughter of Ungoliant. I wanted to maintain the spidery description, and I also wanted to lean into the steel spine description given for her legs. I was also drawn to the idea of her having a chitinous exoskeleton that I tried to more vividly depict as a calcified skeleton. When the card art is about 2.5 inches tall with the goal of stain-glass readability, it’s not always easy to get my ideas across. So, I simplified the concept and married the color palette to the Balrog color theme. I really hope the design for her is appreciated!
I also may or may not be an absolute horse girl, and the Hobby Next set for this release feels like a wink and a smile from the creative team to really let me lean into drawing too many horses. I loved it!
Your art for this game has really come into its own, we’ve noticed your style has had subtle shifts from the first game to the second in a really beautiful way. Can you tell us a bit about how your process and style have evolved between the two games?
That feels like such high praise! Thank you very much! The quality increase is definitely coming from the common colloquialism of “Practice makes perfect,” but I personally like to add a little addendum to the expression. “Intentional practice makes perfect repetition,” and what better way than drawing 40 cards, resting and reflecting, then starting off with all of The Orcs and really leaning into acting inside of the card art.
There’s also a certain amount of endurance of focus that needed to be built when designing this many cards without fatigue. I also got to start on game two right away from launch instead of coming later into the project, with added experience and guidance from the first set already easily applied. This really helped refine and manage the timeline.
We also had the templates for me to design the art around, so now every card gets to sing more clearly without losing major parts of it to a text block.
Now, a more technical explanation!
This is what refining and designing the cards step by step looks like. I’m going to use a particular favorite, Aragorn at Helms Deep, for this one! I use Clip studio paint for everything besides exporting and saving it for print.
First, I draw out the sketch in a messy, loose way. Being less perfect helps depict more flow and movement inside the image. The stairs and arrows flying are only implied, but that’s all that’s needed. Having the template design really helped me maintain composition without losing too many of the important visuals.
Next comes the line art! I use some knowledge from my love of comics and concept art to help me decide what needs to be in focus with a thicker, bolder line. I do this by enhancing the main silhouette and specific structures inside of it like his arm and hands. By emphasizing with a thicker outline, it helps push that feature of the art to the foreground without losing focus in the facets. Sometimes, compromises in the design are made as well. While working in the stain-glass style I ended up losing the feeling of momentum in the twist of his hips in order to better depict stain-glass facets.
The next step really makes the piece come to life! Coloring is one of the most important steps for making the background and foreground separate.
I actually think this is where the most positive change to my style has come into play. I have always loved painting portraits, and I leaned into that as a stylization for painting the cards in the first game, but my understanding and usage of color had gotten better just from the experience of completing so many illustrations. By the time I got to this card, I’m nearing 90 cards drawn and illustrated intentionally in this style.
Did you face any challenges differentiating the art in this game from the first while still keeping the art consistent with the overall themes? For example, the suits all have brand new art treatments.
Absolutely there were! Gosh, wouldn’t it be amazing if I just only hit home-runs? The reality is, there’s always small moments of doubt or uncertainty, especially for a beloved IP where people can put what you’re doing under a microscope. There are several critiques where after they were pointed out I had very strong, “You were right and I’m glad you said so,” moments.
One of them was making sure we had more accuracy in matching the character’s faces from the first deck to The Two Towers. My initial sketches just weren’t quite right, so we ended up re-doing chunks of some of the key cards.
I also had a moment of confusion designing the hill card. It was too green and really did feel too similar to the forest cards. One of my work-flow methods is to have a layout of all of the cards together to make sure the entire deck is maintaining cohesion and after seeing them all side-by-side, changing the color really enhanced the art and separated the suits. I am so grateful for playtesting leading to enhanced cards!
We also weren’t sure about changing the shadow card away from Mt. Doom until later into development. I ended up leaning heavily onto Bryan and asked him to decide the scene we should depict for the shadow suit, and he picked it perfectly! The fallen king vignette depicting the vandalized, decapitated statue was a great choice! The Eye of Sauron on a mocking head replacement fit the vibes for shadow perfectly. I tried to depict it as a peak into the moment, with the observer of the scene looking through trees while being far enough removed from the scene to see the king’s head covered with a blossoming crown. A small, reassuring hope for our fatigued hero’s as they must continue onwards towards greater doom.
There is so much gorgeous art in the second game, did you have a piece that ended up being a favorite?
I mean Glorfindel isn’t in this set, so I guess I don’t have any particular favorites this round… just teasing!
All jokes aside, this is a hard question! I know I really enjoyed drawing Treebeard because I enjoyed putting Merry and Pippin in the picture with him to show scale, but I also really enjoyed painting the four Helm’s Deep pictures!
I also had a major confidence crash when it came to designing the cover. I think it went through the most dramatic changes and iterations of all of the cards, and I ended up asking the Art Director, Matt Fantastic, to give me a pep-talk so I could find the self-confidence to make something that was meant to be a cover design. I know that sounds a little silly, but it really, really helped. Admittedly, I can’t tell if the cover is good or if I just feel a fondness for it because it is proof that asking for help and leaning on the really strong team at Office Dog is something I can do.
We talked about Easter eggs last time as well! Have you hidden some more that Tolkien fans will be excited to discover are in the game?
Oh, my. Yes, they remain absolutely littered with Easter eggs! I’ll throw some simpler ones out for the fun of it! The Hobbits’ hair is slowly growing through their adventure. Not terribly so, as it’s only meant to be about six months, but enough to almost deviate from the earlier pictures.
I also imagined The Orcs of Minas Morgul to have an undertone of green to their skin similar to the corrupted tower. I included Grishnakh because it’s implied he was there for the torture of Gollum in Dol Guldur, as he knows about The One Ring and with Dol Guldur is an outpost of Minas Morgul I decided it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I also designed a little bit of a difference with the Uruk-Hai vs the Mordor-born Orcs.
There is also a moment in the fight of Helm’s Deep where Gimli is with Aragorn and they are fighting together, so their backs are on each other’s cards! Legolas is separated from the duo and is depicted fighting with The Elves.
I also have some consistency with the previous deck and have Gandalf wearing patterns that share similar shape language to Celeborn’s to show that he received the wardrobe from Lothlórien.
One that Bryan really wanted to make sure was depicted for the readers was a visible difference between the eyes of Gollum vs Smeagol. The corrupt green is absolutely a thematic color through this set!
There are others, but I’ll leave those up to our more discerning viewers.
Tolkien inspires people around the world with his works. Can you tell us a bit about how his works have inspired you, both in art and in life?
I feel like I’ve already been incredibly verbose in this interview so I will try to keep this heart-sleeve stitching succinct.
One of the gifts of spending so much time in The Shire initially, getting to know idiosyncrasies of Gaffer and the spoon stealing of Lobelia, is that we get to know what peace is like. How minor grievances are really silly things and meaningless in the long run, though they feel like important events of note when we are wound up in the minutiae of daily life and comforted by smaller scenes nestled away from the reality of the world.
Giving the readers a chance to slow down and reflect in the beginning, we get to feel the deeper loss of returning to a scoured Shire in the final book: the hurt of witnessing what we loved so deeply only remains as a figment of the past that we cannot fully return to, even upon re-reads of the book. We always know that the Party Tree will be cut down. This allows us to lean hard into our cultivating tendencies.
Tolkien has taught me to be a gardener in my day-to-day life both literally and figuratively. I do my best to plant seeds in hopes that future generations will get to sit in the dappled shade of the tree’s outstretched branches without holding on so hard to the past that I can’t move forward. Maybe one day I’ll even finish one of the books I’ve been working on and it will inspire others!
In regards to art, this may come as a surprise, but I consume and enjoy a ton of sci-fi media. I love Astronomy, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, the Foundation series, and games like Destiny and Mass Effect. I don’t think you’d be able to tell by looking at my work, because The Lord of the Rings was so influential to me during my childhood and growing up that now I have spent my whole life drawing knights, elves, and abundant forests in my free time. My mind looks up into the sky with my feet and heart firmly planted on earth, the only home we have ever known.
Tell us what’s next for Elaine Ryan! Where can we next find you, whether that’s projects you’re working on, events you’ll be at, or even just what life has in store!
I am working on a very interesting return project that I’m not sure how much I am at liberty to discuss, but after that project is wrapped up I will be taking several months just for myself and rebuilding my portfolio! I have been working consistently for almost three years on other projects, and I feel it’s time to focus hard on what I have been developing!
Once conventions are solidified, I’ll absolutely be posting my schedule online for everyone to come say hello! Maybe I’ll have similar luck to this year and get to stop into an Asmodee booth and sign some cards and games with Bryan Bornmueller(game designer), Sam Shimota(supporting illustrator), and Bree Woodward(creative director)!
I will be working on art, my novel, and some fun merchandise for conventions I plan on attending! You’ll be able to find all that info either on my website: elaineryanart.com, or by subscribing to my e-mail list!
If anyone wants a preview of my writing style, feel free to check it out here: https://www.elaineryanart.com/writing/surena
I’ll also be releasing a poker playing card deck with the thematics of Sun (hearts), Moon (clubs), Stars (diamonds) and Dust (spades) hopefully in the fall of next year. All of that info will be released early on my Patreon with as well as full release dates on my e-mail list.
Thank you for such lovely questions! I hope people enjoy The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game just as much as the first one, if not a little more!
Thank you, Elaine, for sharing some of your thoughts with us, and thank you readers for accompanying us for this conversation. Remember to secure your copy of The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game at your local game store or online.
