Finding Inspiration for Board Game Artwork: A Practical Guide for Artists

Introduction

Let’s just start with this fun time line graph:
Below is a simple timeline graph showing how inspiration often spikes near deadlines.

Does this sound familiar? While this graph usually represents work deadlines, the same applies to finding inspiration for board game artwork – the right idea at the right time can make your creative process much more efficient.

Jokes aside, finding inspiration – regardless of the topic – can be approached in many ways. In this blog post, I’ll share practical tips on how to find inspiration for board game artwork.

Finding and categorising inspiration for Board Game Artwork

I believe there are two key parts: how to find inspiration and how to manage it once you’ve found it. It matters a lot where you “store” things and how. Imagine you find some board game artwork randomly while browsing on your daily platform and if you don’t save it immediately, maybe your feed won’t show it to you EVER AGAIN (or at least it will be really hard to find it again, haha). 

Let’s break the process down into smaller, actionable steps:

• Finding Inspiration
  • Time your inspiration gathering
  • Using the right keywords
  • Platforms I use for inspiration
• Categorising inspiration
• How to harvest your inspiration

Finding inspiration

Time your inspiration gathering

Decide when to actively look for inspiration instead of relying only on passive browsing. 

You can schedule and dedicate each day a portion of your time when you close out all incoming distractions and will focus only on things belonging to your goal.

I mean you still can save some incoming interesting content during your daily browsing but how often did you go back and check all the “I will save it for later” contents? You only look at these kinds of saved content when you actually start a project where you want to put yourself in the right mood and that’s when you need to do it right.

This is especially important when working on board game artwork projects with deadlines.

Using the right keywords

When searching online, using the right keywords is one of the most effective ways to find high-quality board game artwork inspiration. Today, it’s easier than ever to find inspiration online – but your results depend heavily on the keywords you use. I know AI is also one of the options, but I would encourage you to ignore it for inspiration gathering and I will also tell you the reason why. To find something useful for yourself with AI search you have to prompt it well, and if you think about it, it is also the same process when it comes to searching websites for inspiration. I know it will sound corny, but you have to use the right keywords in order to find yourself the desired results of content.

Try to be specific. Narrow down your search by adding more detail to it. You can approach it from various angles: By art style, by artist, by board game. Maybe the art style is the broadest of these, because the other two are tied to the actual artist or the board game itself. 

For example when I want to inspire myself in the world of jazz because I know the game I will work on puts itself in the age of jazz, and it will require for me to draw various playful looking instruments for it then I can either go with the keywords “jazz” in general, or “jazz instruments” or “jazz posters”, “playful jazz instruments”, “jazz illustrations”, “boardgames and jazz”.

Each of these searches will show you different images, try them out.

But if you know you want to achieve similar results as some specific artist, then of course you can write the name of the artist and find their profile on the web. 

If you already know some board games that are connected with jazz, you can search for those for different results from the previous two approaches. For example: Prodigals Club, Bebop, Shuffle and Swing, Speakeasy.

It all depends on the angle you want to start.

Platforms I use for inspiration

I usually gather board game artwork inspiration from several platforms, each serving a different purpose: 

• I use Pinterest when I want to kick off my search with a broader perspective, like a mood starter.
• If I want to see one specific artist’s works, then I go to Artstation or DeviantArt, maybe Instagram.
• When I have a specific game in mind, I go to BoardGameGeek.

Each of these platforms has pros and cons. Lots of websites are using tags for their content, enabling you to filter it too. 

For example, BoardGameGeek gathers all the information for you regarding board games. If you remember the name of the game but not the artists, go check the game’s profile where you see all of its credits:

Categorising Board Game Artwork Inspirations

I have a favourite motion animator/video editor on the field, Ben Mariott who always says: “We always name our layers”, which is 100% true when it comes to categorising your inspirational assets. Organising your board game artwork references is just as important as finding them.

As you probably already know, Instagram lets you create your own groups when you save content. Pinterest and Artstation let you create mood boards for the same purposes.

Use these groupings to your advantage and create a way that it lets you navigate easily between them:

If we go back to the keywords, you can see that all of the 3 groups below could belong under the keyword “jazz”, but I still divided them into more groups, so later on I can access only the one which matters to my case.

This is just one example, but you can also sort your groupings as you see fit 🙂 Go wild with tags/names but try to name those groups so that later on they will help you sort and also find your saved inspirational contents.

Harvest your Inspirations

There’s no real secret here – but having a structured system makes a huge difference. If you did everything the way your logic works, then you can easily navigate through your saved and sorted out board game artwork inspirational content.

To summarise, learning how to find, organise, and use board game artwork inspiration will significantly improve your creative workflow and help you create more cohesive and professional designs.