Following our adventures with the Knights Kingdom trading cards in 2004 and 2005, LEGO assembled a stable of freelance illustrators for cooking up several years of Ninjago cards. I missed out on that process - I was away working on LEGO Universe - but I came back to take over illustration of the big new upcoming Legends of Chima line that was replacing Ninjago in 2014. I inherited the Ninjago illustrators for this project, although not always on a predictable schedule, since I was sharing them with several other LEGO themes without warning over the course of the year.

Given that I couldn't be completely sure when I would or wouldn't have any given freelancer support, and since the illustrations would have to be brought to a near-final state before the character and product designs they were based on could be finalized, the first task was to develop a flexible art pipeline that could handle months of interminable last-minute changes, swapping different artists and designs in and out without warning.

In the end, once we'd gotten the Chima team together and hashed out the character and story beats we wanted to highlight, it was my job to make the basic card layout sketches and secure approvals for all 160 cards, and then put together briefings to pass out to the freelance team as each batch of layouts received approval. I and whichever freelance artists were available completed two draft illustrations per person per week, which I would then set aside until the character and model designs were finalized. Once I got the go-ahead from the animators and product designers, I then did the 160 finish passes myself over several sleepless weeks, bringing them all into alignment with the final designs and with each other.

The freelance illustrators brought in to work on these cards, at various times over the course of 2012-2013, were Jake Masbruch, Andreas Rocha, Jonas Springborg, and later on, Craig Sellars and Stuart Reeves.

I don't have the spreadsheets anymore for which artists worked on which parts of each image, but around 20-25% of these were mine from start to finish. Most of the rest involved a single other artist, especially in these early cards. Later on, once we were more comfortable with the pipeline, I started passing images between the artists more often for elements that played to their particular strengths.

Most of the Speedor sets were just a single Speedor vehicle and Chima character minifigure, but with each product wave there were a few double packs. I always tried to give each double pack one pair of trading cards whose illustrations lined up with each other for a single panoramic double image.

The toughest part about illustrating for LEGO is that the production schedules have the artwork due before the products are finalized, and LEGO is often unwilling or incapable of sharing unfinished product information even with its own employees. For the first wave of cards especially, we had no models or legible photos of the minifigures to work from, and were forced to base the characters and vehicles mostly on guesswork and crossed fingers.

(Luckily, while LEGO's internal security is airtight when it comes to keeping vital information out of the hands of its own employees, its external security is almost nonexistent, and we were able to depend on internet fan sites for a stready stream of leaked reference photos as always.)

With the animated series on top of the product line, the problem was compounded, as major details of the world, story, and characters were still changing dramatically long after the product art and designs were finalized.

Winzar the Wolf was a funny example. When we painted the cards for Winzar, the spiky rocks known as the Fangs were a hazardous labyrinth of snow and ice. Later, the story was changed so that they were warm and tropical to match the rest of Chima, now threatening with sinkholes and earthquakes instead. Too late for Winzar; his cards had him Speedoring around in an unexplained wintry environment that didn't exist in the final version of Chima.

And then a couple product lines later, Chima was attacked by ice zombie animals like Voom Voom the Vulture. Just like that, the Winzar cards looked like deliberate foreshadowing rather than an own goal.

In Chima's second big story arc, the waters of the floating island of Mount Cavora dried up, and the heroes headed out to the toxic green mists of the Outlands to fight a bunch of mutant plants and an army of spiders, scorpions, and bats. The heroes also meet Chima's own mystery Racer X character, Shadowind.

In Chima's final arc, the floating island of Mount Cavora catches on fire, and ice age animal zombies from Chima's past return to life to invade.

This series added two new card types to the trading card game: Chi Shrines and Obstacles. It also saw the end of custom names for cards. If you only knew the amount of wrangling that went into securing legal approvals for 160 completely made-up card names that would never be used again, ever, in either the story or products.