CASE STUDY
The Game of Life
WMS held an annual art show where all employees—not just artists—could submit work based on a yearly theme. One year’s theme was Hasbro Games. I reimagined The Game of Life as a high-stakes survival challenge, inspired by 1970s movie posters, where the ultimate goal wasn’t just marriage and family, but making it out alive.
Sketches / The initial idea was to have the various elements of the game exploding with the word “LIFE” looming in the background. While the layout was dynamic, there didn’t seem to be a “why?” that connected everything together.
Initial sketch.
I played around with the layout and decided to change it to a more forward-facing, symmetrical composition that gave everything more cohesion. I then added one of the buildings, suggesting some sort of relationship between the peg people, explosion and building.
Rendering / I started fleshing out the various elements of the poster, beginning with the spinner wheel. Since this was more or less a flat element I created it in Illustrator.
From there I used Modo to render both the peg people, the cars and the building.
Peg People model.
Cars modeled, colored and lit.
Color, material and lighting added.
3D elements added to sketch.
Paintover / After reviewing where I was at, I decided to swap out the office building with the mansion as more of the building would be visible and it would add more to the backstory of the poster.
I then digitally painted over the 3D models and rendered the explosion, trying to achieve a high-contrast, posterized look, reminiscent of 70s action movies.
Text and graphical elements were added, drawing from the box art from the original game, but adding perspective to make the composition more dynamic.
The final touch was adding the credits that named the various pieces used in the game, as well as who had created it, and finally some people who had helped me out.
Final product / The poster was printed on high-quality paper and framed for the show, where it was displayed in the main lobby of the WMS building.
