In this board game art interview, I’m speaking to A. Giroux, a Canadian artist, whose work on the Gazebo and Gingham artwork brought a whimsical table presence to abstract game mechanics.

Alisha gave a great talk on the subject of AI artwork called “The Creative Fingerprint,” which I encourage people to watch when they have the time. On a website spotlighting creatives, it should surprise absolutely no one that I’m passionately against any system that profits from others’ work without appropriate compensation and credit.

Alisha has worked with an impressive array of clients, from The Canadian Mint to Shopify, and her talents are now brightening up our board game shelves. Enjoy!

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For more great insights into board game art, check out the interview archive.

Gazebo Board Game Cover Art — *Gazebo board game box art*

Thanks for joining us, Alisha! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hello! I’m a Canadian freelance artist currently living life between the capital city of Ottawa and a small rural farm in Quebec. I spend my working days designing stuff for a variety of cool clients, and my personal time gardening, travelling, road biking, and volunteering in abandoned graveyards.

*Sketches for the Primrose TTRPG Rulebook*

Have you always wanted to be an artist?

Nope, but growing up, I had a strong connection with nature, and it inspired me to draw all sorts of animals and fantasy creatures from the time I could hold a pencil. This, of course, steered me towards a career in the arts. I pursued a post-secondary education in graphic design, which gave me a solid foundation in design principles, but illustration was always a self-taught endeavour, completely fuelled by a passion for wildlife.

My ‘artistic trajectory’ involved working for a design studio for about a decade, then getting a lucky break that got me into tech. There were a few golden years before a sudden mass layoff happened, and I experienced my first bout of unemployment. It disoriented me in terms of how I saw myself professionally, but in the end, I came out of it more confident and with a much healthier relationship with my work (never tie your self-worth to your employment, folks!). Now, I illustrate more than I design, and I have never been happier with my work.

What is your usual process for creating art?

First, a terrible bout of imposter syndrome must arrive and pass. There’s always this kind of panic moment when staring at a fresh blank page that I’ve come to accept as a necessary step in the process. Once I’ve combed through a few design resources, which can be anything from a book on local mushrooms to the old iSpy publications, something eventually sparks. What comes next is mood boarding, googling, and a lot of sketching by hand. I’m a keen believer in starting with pencil and paper first — it’s faster, looser, and ideas tend to tumble out much more quickly without the distraction of a digital screen.

You’ve worked with various industries, from Shopify to The Royal Canadian Mint. How do you usually land your commissions?

I do get this question a lot! And my answer is that it’s almost always been word of mouth.

The Royal Canadian Mint came about when the studio I worked for was designing coin packaging on a regular basis. I not-so-subtly let The Mint know I enjoyed illustration, and they eventually let our studio pitch a series of packaging and five 1$ coins (loonies), which we won. After that, my name was in their system, and I’ve been pitching designs ever since. To date, I have eight official coins, with over half a million minted designs circulating out there somewhere.

How did you start working in the board game industry?

It all started with a personal art piece called ‘By Fire’. Allplay saw it and reached out to ask if I could do a few more in that style, which were later published as playing cards Lunar. Lunar led to me being seen by Bitewing Games and working on Cat Blues and Shuffle & Swing, and more recently Gingham and Gazebo.

Working with Bitewing put me in touch with Daniel Newman, which led to the Somnia card game, as well as with Facade Games and their latest social deduction game. All of that came from putting a single, quick digital illustration online, which led to this wild, board game-oriented domino effect. Zero complaints.

Cat Blues features an array of hand-drawn cat musicians with big personalities. Where did your inspiration for the art come from?

Something I enjoy doing is creating playlists for specific projects. So for Cat Blues, I created a jazzy playlist handpicked from my grandfather’s record collection, which included some classic artists like Galt MacDermot (Coffee Cold), Ike Quebec, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock (Cantaloupe Island), and of course Dave Brubeck (Take Five, Unsquare Dance). Catered and thematic playlists like that really help me get into the right headspace.

And if anyone is familiar with the energizing, jazzy cat scene in The Aristocats, that was a huge lightbulb moment in terms of where I wanted to take the game.

(Below is Alisha’s cat Monty, who sadly passed away the day Cat Blues launched on Kickstarter.)

Gingham and Gazebo are charming abstract games. How do you balance function with personality when working on more abstract projects?

This is a great question — It’s always a delicate balancing act. You want colour, but not too much, imagery, but you don’t want to visually overload the players, etc.. My background in graphic design helps me curb my desire to use all the colours, because in the end working with a limited palette is always going to be more impactful. A good example might be the border designs for Gazebo.

They had to have an appealing theme (bird sanctuary, flower garden), be beautiful and enticing, but not distract from the main game board, so I gave them a crisp aesthetic and limited it to three colours only, with one common colour across all four designs to tie it together.

(Fun fact, Nick and I hid a small nerdy easter egg somewhere in the Gazebo artwork. Props to anyone who finds it.)

Gazebo Board Game Borders — *Gazebo Board Game - Borders*

Somnia is tonally very different to the other board games I’ve mentioned. Is there an allure of working on creatively varied projects?

Somnia was a ton of fun to work on! When new clients come my way looking for custom illustrations, I often ask them to pull artwork from my social media as examples of what they’re looking for. I have a few ‘styles’, mostly born of my constant experimentation. I do sometimes worry that I don’t have one solid aesthetic, but on the other hand I personally have more fun trying to flex my skills and see how far I can push something, and it’s led to some fantastic collaborations. Daniel chose my more inky experiments, and so we ran with that.

For Somnia’s theme, I didn’t pull from my own dreams so much as I pulled from weird art I grew up loving — so things like Beetlejuice or Tim Burton were a huge inspiration. I don’t think I could pull inspiration from my nightmares, unless you want a card game about missing important flights or picking up teeth.

*Somnia card game. Designed by Kazuma Suzuki. Published by New Mill Industries.*

I listened to your fascinating talk on AI, “The Creative Fingerprint.” Where does this technology leave artists and art appreciators?

Oof yeah, this is the sujet du jour in the art community. In its current form, genAI (text to image/video) runs on IP theft, without credit or compensation to the original artists. Unfortunately it’s sold to the public as a kind of digital magic that pulls from the ether, and many people don’t know any better. And when it comes to its ubiquity, I often compare it to other magical things like Radium, which has good, specific uses, but went through a period where it was unashamedly added to everything from sodapop to paint. Yes, I want AI to help me book a plane ticket, no I don’t want it in my dishwasher. You get the idea.

My biggest worry is the impact it could have on budding creatives. The risk is that they may no longer want to pursue a career in the arts, or worse, use genAI and atrophy skills that would have otherwise blossomed without it.

I could go on! To tie it back to our theme, those I’ve worked with in the board game community really seem to cherish and appreciate genuine creativity and ingenuity, and I hope that’s a trend that continues in the face of techbros doing what they do best.

Do you have any advice for new artists?

Something I wish I’d learned earlier was how to say ‘No’ to the projects that don’t feel like a good fit (listen to your gut on this), and ‘Yes’ to the ones that excite but scare you. The work I am happiest with to date came from saying yes to something I wasn’t sure I could pull off. Do it scared, that’s where you’ll experience the most growth.

*Lunar board game. Designed by Masato Uesugi. Published by Allplay.*

What are you reading, listening to, or looking at to fuel your work?

I find one of the best ways to fuel my work is to take breaks. It’s taken a lot of time (and episodes of burnout) to learn that pauses are a necessary part of the process. For me, that looks like long, pensive bike rides, trips to obscure antique shops, or game nights with friends.

I’ve also got some really great design-savvy friends to bounce ideas off of. Most recently, I was brainstorming for a board game set in the Roman Empire, which I knew very little about, but knew a friend who’d studied it in University. I was able to pick their brain and come out with a much richer approach to the project, which was far more valuable than any level of image googling.

Lastly, consuming a lot of non-design content is paramount. The more obscure hyperfixations and rabbit holes you get into, the more resources and ideas you have to mentally pull from later. So I play games, both digital and physical (currently it’s The Long Dark, Thousand Year Vampire, Into the Breach), read daily (Earth’s Children series, Southern Reach, Hyperion), and listen to a lot of podcasts (The Chernobyl Podcast about the HBO miniseries, Science Vs., Ologies).

Finally, where can we see more of your work?

Here you can see my portfolio and visit my online shop. You can also follow me on BlueSky and Instagram. Find my Graveyard volunteer work (and some art) under the Instagram account Grave Matters.

Thanks to Alisha Giroux for providing the images for this article.

Alisha Giroux: Art in Board Games #73