The art of storytelling Tanya Combrinck meets three artists whose passion projects see them building new worlds filled with their own cast of characters

Reliah A. Szade's character Psyche, whose body "has an additional support system for nanobots from an ancient relic.”

“Creating characters is a way of making sense of things, overcoming inner demons, and at the same time, it’s an expression of love,” says Katherine Wang.

Working in games, movies or a big franchise you’ve always loved can be a dream come true, but realising someone else’s vision has its limits in terms of your own creative expression. We all want to spread our wings as artists and creators, and there’s nothing like conceiving of your own world and inventing your own characters.

Stephen Gibson is an art director at tabletop games company Arcane Wonders, and is soon to move into video games at Sumo Digital. Outside of work, he decided he needed a solo project when his collaborations with others kept falling apart. “After a few years of noodling away in my mother’s musty basement, I successfully kickstarted my own board game, Grimslingers, in early 2017,” he says. “After getting married and having two young children, the pressure was on and tensions were high as I worked towards something that had a pretty good chance of failure.”

EXPRESSING PASSIONS

“Farewell My Homeland explores themes of belonging, forgiveness, and learning to live fully even when life is messy and cruel,” explains Katherine Wang.

Grimslingers is a sci-fi, fantasy western-themed card game set in “a land beyond God’s reckonin'”, the Forgotten West. “It’s a weird western,” he says. Two of the characters he’s developing for the next version of the game are twin sibling bounty-hunters that were tricked into demon possession by an alien. The players take the role of demons on the run from the Lord of Darkness, and they assume control of the twins. “The God Stone chooses them to work across parallel dimensions and timelines with various versions of themselves with the hopes of dethroning the Lord of Darkness.”