Artist: Sean McNiff

Sean McNiff is a self-taught artist with a fun, expressive style that hearkens back to classic comics. Working mainly in pencil, ink, and digital mediums, Sean draws inspiration from the likes of Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Mad Magazine, and other vintage comic titles.   Sean has been a part of Renown: The Card Game longer than any other artist, with a hand in shaping its earliest designs. His input helped define the project’s tone, and the final look owes much to his early sketches and relentless experimentation. As Sean put it, “Well I’ll say it’s been a long road of thumbnails and sketches just to get the logo and card done alone. I had tons of ideas that I thought were good but they just didn’t work. It’s like the saying goes ‘1000 bad drawings to every good one.’ Once I narrowed the style and simplicity down it came together pretty quick.”   His favorite contributions include the Four Horsemen and Waffles the White. “I enjoyed doing a lot of the cards because I could squeeze humor into them but some really were a challenge and made me want to snap my pencil in half,” Sean said. His process involved sketching on computer paper before scanning and digitally inking them in Flash.   While Sean has since stepped away from professional art to focus on family and personal work, his legacy remains central to Renown. If he ever returns to the scene, we’ll be first in line to rope him into more weird, cool stuff.