The last few years have seen numerous trading card games (or TCGs) enter the market, and while that’s not unusual, what has been surprising is just how popular they’ve become. The big three (namely Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh) have survived and thrived despite countless other games launching over the last three decades, and it seems that there’s been no serious competition to challenge their dominance.
Until recently, that is. In 2023, Disney Lorcana launched to enormous critical and commercial success, and has already revealed its sixth set, with publisher Ravensburger settling into a release pattern that’ll be familiar to long term TCG fans, and no signs of slowing down. Earlier in 2024, the developer and publisher Fantasy Flight released a new Star Wars trading card game, one in a long line of Star Wars card games: Star Wars Unlimited.
Like Disney Lorcana, Star Wars Unlimited seemed to hit the ground running, with product selling out all over the world, and numerous cards selling for hundreds of dollars. Star Wars Unlimited, as you can read about in our review, brings a streamlined, easy to understand game to the tabletop, with compelling, thematic mechanics and a genuine Star Wars feel, featuring battles unfolding over ground, and in space, at the same time.
The artwork for Star Wars Unlimited brings an almost comic book style aesthetic to the game, different to the actual production photos or publicity shots used in games such as the original, mid-90s Star Wars Customizable Card Game, or the more painterly look of Fantasy Flight’s own Star Wars Living Card Game.
Despite there being a recognisable house style for the cards, there’s enough leeway for individual artists to bring their own, signature look to the game, and one of the standout artists for Star Wars Unlimited is Axel Hutt. As I found out when we spoke, despite the slight nominative determinism of his name, Axel (credited on the cards as Amélie Hutt, as you can see from the two cards in the image above) wasn’t actually a fan of Star Wars before his involvement with providing card art for Fantasy Flight Games, which goes much further back than his work on the current game. I was fortunate enough to speak directly to Axel about his work on Star Wars Unlimited, along with his long, impressive history of providing artwork for trading card games in general.
The Axel Hutt Interview
Hi Axel, thanks for joining me today. Where are you based at the moment?
I’m based in California [having graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2013, majoring in Art], but I’m originally from Belgium. English is my second language!
I’m a huge Star Wars fan, with The Empire Strikes Back being the first film I saw at the cinema (yes, I’m old) and having been born the year the very first film was released (so, so old). Are you a fan yourself?
I wasn’t when I started working on Star Wars illustrations as a job, but the more work I do, the more characters I discover every time, and it’s growing on me!
I find it surprising that you weren’t a fan prior to your Star Wars work, because you have such a knack for illustrating the characters and other elements of the universe that captures them brilliantly. I take it that it wasn’t an active dislike!
I guess that I was neutral about it; I saw The Phantom Menace as a teenager, and I thought it was a cool movie, but it didn’t stick with me.
Honestly, as a Star Wars fan, that doesn’t surprise me at all! I doubt I would have been as big a fan if The Phantom Menace was my first entry point, unless I discovered it as a young kid! Speaking of being younger, where did your interest in art begin?
It was there from the start! I was drawing even as a toddler, and I never stopped. It was something I always did, growing up, and it just stuck; drawing illustrations, particularly when I’m given a creative brief, is very rewarding for me. Kind of a problem solving sort of thing.
So it also feels like a mental challenge, as well as translating into a physical skill?
Yes, and I’m happy when my art directors are happy! So I turn a paragraph of words into an illustration; it’s like a puzzle, being given a description and turning that into into art.
Did you have any specific artists that inspired you or informed the way your work developed?
Usually the artists I like the most have very different styles from mine; either a very realistic or very painterly.
Having seen your work in your comic series, Angels Power (the second volume of which is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter), which is how we first got in contact with each other, I’d say that your work is both realistic and painterly, but admittedly I’m not the most knowledgeable person in terms of art techniques and terminology. Do you see the distinction because you work digitally?
It feels like with oil paint, with brush strokes and the feel of the oils blending together, is a style I don’t have at all. I could emulate it if I wanted to, but for me, I need very tight control with my painting. I render every little bit.
Is that a preference when it comes to working with, say, Fantasy Flight? They prefer it if you do paint digitally?
Yeah, they request that, unless you’re more of a well known artist, and they know they can count on you, to create traditional artwork in a timely manner. Working digitally i’s more convenient and easier to manage.
When did you first start working with Fantasy Flight?
The first was Call of Cthulhu, then Android: Netrunner; then they kept asking for more! I worked on their Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones card games too.
You provided lots of art for their Living Card Games; I take it that it was this work that led to you working on the Star Wars Living Card Game they were publishing at the time?
Yes, I worked on that a little; then after that, I did some work for them on another card game, Legend of the Five Rings. From there, I then moved on when they started to develop Star Wars Unlimited.
Which of course is why we’re here now; it’s been a huge success, with the first set seeing massive demand, and Fantasy Flight have really committed to it, with design work already deeply underway on set 9, despite the third set not yet having hit store shelves at this stage. Has the success of the game surprised you?
It has! I’ve been getting a lot of random emails from fans [of my work on Star Wars Unlimited]. Sometimes it’s just to tell me how much they love the work I’ve done, which is not something I’m used to, because I’m kind of a recluse! I don’t go out and meet anybody, or go to conventions or anything like too much. So I don’t know what’s going on! Then receiving all of these emails, saying things like, “I love your work”, “your art is my favourite”, “do you sell prints?” It’s really heartwarming!
I can imagine that for people to go out of their way to actually get in contact with you, to tell you how much they appreciate your work, that must be a great feeling.
Yes, it’s pretty unusual. I’m not really ‘out there’ that much, right? I don’t really do social media, so they have to go and dig up and find my email, it’s not a very simple process.
It’s great to hear that you’re getting such recognition from fans for your work, and of course with Fantasy Flight’s commitment to the game, it seems like you’ll be working on Star Wars Unlimited for a very long time! Going back to the beginning, we know where and when your work with Fantasy Flight started, but how did that actually come together in the beginning?
So, I did some work on Call of Cthulhu for Fantasy Flight, as you know; not too many, but that’s where it started. I had a DeviantArt page at the time, and I think that’s that might be where they found me. As I’ve said, I don’t have a lot of social media presence, so I think that’s where they found it and they were like, “hey, you want to do work for us?” I think the first commission I did for them was 2012, and it’s been ongoing ever since!
Now, we’ve talked about you not really being a big fan of Star Wars before working on the games, but what about card games themselves, or board games in general?
Well, I always wanted to work in illustration, so when Fantasy Flight approached me I was interested, but I don’t play a lot of games myself usually, because I have a very short attention span! Even just reading the rules, it’s sometimes too much for me!I get samples of the games I contribute to; I did some artwork for Fury of Dracula [Third Edition, published in 2015 by Fantasy Flight], and so I got a sample of that too. I tried to sit down with my cousi,n who wanted to open the game, and we read through the rules, an hour passed and we were like, “you know what, I don’t want to play any more!”
I totally get that; any new rulebook, for just about any game, no matter how streamlined or simple they claim to be, can be very daunting.
I don’t have the attention span for it! I like other stuff, like writing roleplaying stories, I guess similar to Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve never actually played DnD, but it’s that principle; whenever something has so many rules that it has a big guide that I have to read, I’m out.
That’s really interesting, because you say you have no attention span, yet you’ve created your own very complex world, with its own settings, characters, supernatural races and, essentially, its own rules that it’s governed by, in your comic series, Angels Power. It’s very dense and has quite a few layers; it’s a story that really demands that the reader pays attention. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course!
[Laughs] I am quite contrary like that, I guess!
So you’ve done a great job with Angels Power, but it must be a very different process to work on your own stories and settings than working on something so established, like Star Wars. How does each piece end up coming together? Do they approach you with a card title, or concept, or character?
It all starts with them knowing how many cards I can do within a certain timeline. We go from sketch, to work in progress, to final images in around 3 months. I tell them how many I can do in that timeframe, and then they give me a list of cards.
What’s on that list?
On there will be the title, the type of card and the format. There’ll be a paragraph about where the card is about, so for example: this character, doing this or that, in a certain place, with direction on the focus for the image. Is it the character itself? What they’re holding? What they’re doing? Or maybe the ‘emotion’.
So you just work based on those descriptions?
That’s where I start; I make a sketch based on that. I give them a sketch, which they review and then it’s either “that’s good to go, you can go ahead and start rendering it”, or they ask me to adjust something. So for example, they’ll ask can you do it a bit like this, can you do that, change this part and so on. With it being Star Wars stuff, it’s very precise, because of the whole IP [intellectual property] and everything. You can’t make mistakes with it; you don’t create much of anything, so much as arrange, rearrange and orchestrate the illustration like a story.
As an obsessive Star Wars fan myself, and particularly with the rise of the internet and very online fandom, I get it; there’s bound to be a lot of attention on the accuracy of artwork, not just from Fantasy Flight and Lucasfilm, but from fans themselves!
Yeah, the designs of the characters and the places are very much set in stone, so you have to be really accurate. Sometimes you’ll have to go back into an illustration after it’s done because you’ve been told something like, “oh, can you make that little logo on the shoulder yellow instead of this colour?”
It sounds like it can sometimes be quite a time consuming process! So how many levels of approval does it have to go through before it’s finished?
First, the art goes to my art directors; they’re kind of the first line of defence on the art to make sure I’m following all the direction correctly. Then it goes through the Lucasfilm team. Then, you double check; everything then goes back and forth and back again! You find that you even say to yourself, “let me change this a little bit.”
With all that in mind, how long does it take, from the beginning of the concept of a piece of art, until it’s finished and approved?
It can take a long time! The sketch itself, I’ll think about it in my head after I’ve read the brief. I’ll think about it during the day and then the sketch will maybe take me an hour; I’ll sit down and I’ll draw it in an hour. So yes, the sketch is done in an hour, but of course there’s also the time where I’ll be thinking about it before I start drawing. The sketch is sent off, and then it can be a few weeks for them to come back to me, but sometimes it takes longer. Then, it can take between a couple of days, up to a week to finish the illustration from the sketch, depending how detailed it gets. With something like a big spaceship [like a Star Destroyer, or the Millennium Falcon] you have tons of details.
Which I suppose have to be fairly detailed when you’re illustrating them, without straying from the style of the card art overall. I take it that you use reference material that Fantasy Flight send you for things like that?
Yes, I need references for these. I have to do it the way it’s supposed to be. Sometimes it’s screenshots from the movies, and sometimes, it’s the actual props or prototypes that they made [during the production of the films], at Industrial Light and Magic.
I love that stuff! I was obsessed with those as a kid; I had all kinds of books and magazines that took a look at all of the behind the scenes, special effects work on the Star Wars movies.
Yes, it’ll be pictures of those ships that they built for the old movies, before they were all built in 3D, using CGI. So I look at all these cool pictures of all the props from the movies, ships, of course, sometimes pictures of the lightsabers for reference too. Then, I tend to rebuild it as a 3D model for myself, digitally, as a base for my art. I don’t build it as detailed as the movie or anything; it’s kind of basic, just to get the proportions and main details together. Then it’s drawing and painting it; maybe a week and a half of actual time spent on one illustration, if you count the emails that are going back and forth; as I said before.
So you have to do this for each illustration, but you also have to work on multiple illustrations at a time?
I have to work on a bunch of them together, so it does get kind of intense; I work on a batch of say, four, six, seven or more, Get them all through the sketch phase, send those and then I’ll work on other commissions. Then they come back to me with the [feedback on] the sketches, so I can move forward into the ‘work in progress’ [stage].. That he’s said that.
It’s really interesting to hear the process in such detail, and broken down as that; I think as a card gamer you often appreciate the finished piece of art on a card, which is often one of the most appealing and most immediately striking things about a card in any given game. It’s what connects you to the card in the first place, before you read the card’s text, for example. As much as we appreciate the art on a card, I don’t think we often think about or realise just how much work goes into that illustration.
Yeah, it’s pretty intense work, mentally but also physically too. I’m on the verge of ruining my arm a little bit; getting pain in my elbow joints and things like that!
I guess that’s definitely what they call suffering for your art, but please take care of yourself! So you’ve covered lots of really popular characters in Star Wars Unlimited already, with more than 60 cards already released that feature your art. There’s a great Kylo Ren card (that’s also been used for a very special set of Star Wars Unlimited collector cards), just as one example of those. Are there any characters, settings, vehicles or anything else that you haven’t worked on that you’d like to do for Star Wars Unlimited?
I guess I haven’t done Darth Vader yet, that would be cool!
Your Boba Fett Leader card is currently the most valuable card in the game altogether; it’s selling for an average price of just over $750 at the moment!
I was really amazed by that! They like this one. I guess! like that they’re doing this to make it a little more like Magic: The Gathering with the rarity, it makes it feel special. That was a fun card to do, with the ship behind him and the city too.
I know you were saying that you had been inspired by very painterly styles but from that card alone, you can see that Star Wars Unlimited doesn’t really stick to that.
Yeah, so for this game, they were asking for a different and simpler kind of style. Almost like a cartoon. So yes, it’s not my usual style, which is more painted and it’s more painted, polished stuff. So when they asked me to do a different style, I kind of had to figure it out. To make it my own, but different, because they didn’t want the painterly style. They were ok with a kind of ‘rough’ painted style, but I don’t really paint that way. So I was kind of figuring out. how to do that. So I decided to use line art and crosshatching for them.
Overall, there’s kind of a comic book aesthetic to Star Wars Unlimited, so that makes sense. Not what you’d think of in terms of classic, Golden Age comics, but definitely a modern comic book vibe; cel shading, crosshatching and line art, as you’ve said.
Yes, so they gave us some options as to how we wanted to engage with that, using line art if we wanted. Kind of cel shaded but not quite [the same], but actually they’re changing that a little now. I think what we’re going for now is the clean line art, but also a little bit more rendered within that. So a little bit more detail, but not the [painted and/or photorealistic] Magic: The Gathering style; still staying with a sort of comic book feel, with more detail, which is cool.
You’ve got an awful lot of cards out there in sets already (65 individual cards, though some are extended art versions), but I take it that you’re working on cards from upcoming sets too? The third set for Star Wars Unlimited, Twilight of the Republic, is out later this year, so I expect we’ll be seeing more of your work in that set?
I don’t even know the names of the sets, or when they become available! We get a number, a name; I don’t even know how much of my work has already come out, but there’s also quite a lot more [to come]!
So I suspect that we’ll be seeing your work for a long time to come, given that 9 sets are already either released, finalised or in the planning stages right now! Finally, in terms of the cards you’ve worked on, what is your favourite so far?
I love the Wedge Antilles card; it was really hard to make because it was a view inside his [X-Wing] ship. I didn’t have a lot of reference for it; all I had was the movie screenshots, and he doesn’t appear very much in the original movies!
That’s right, Wedge almost accidentally survives the assault on the Death Star at the end of the first Star Wars film, and then goes on to briefly appear in the next two films (and The Rise of Skywalker too, though that’s at a different timeline to the card image!).
Yes, so I had to reconstruct the Insider of the X-Wing. I wanted to be precise about it, give it proper perspective, so I had to reconstruct it. Show the back of the ship, and the drives on each side [outside the X-Wing’s canopy]. It was my favourite because of how challenging it was, to reconstruct it in a sort of specific way; I really enjoyed how it ended up, with the mixture of detail and painted, flat colours, along with his hands blurred in the front of the image. The suggestion of where he is in the [X-Wing], seeing through the windows of the cockpit, with the stars behind him. That was probably what was so interesting for me; I really liked the artistic aspects of it.
Thanks for your time Axel, it was great to speak to you, and I’m looking forward to seeing much more of your work in Star Wars Unlimited, and of course in Angels Power too!
More For Star Wars Fans On Card Gamer
If you’re a Star Wars fan, but you’ve yet to check out Star Wars Unlimited, take a look at our review of the game here. You’ll also find at least one card by Axel Hutt on our list of the most valuable Shadows of the Galaxy cards too. We’ve looked at card games in TV show Star Wars: The Bad Batch, video game Star Wars Outlaws and we’ve covered the history of Star Wars card games on the tabletop too!
