Illustrating Nature: Interview with

Flight Artist Lauren Helton

Nature launches in US retail on July 31st and is the most anticipated game at GenCon 2025. To celebrate the launch, we're sharing interviews with the series' amazing artists.

Preorders for Nature and Nature: Flight are now open .

Creating mechanics that mimic real-world evolutionary systems is just one step in bringing the theme to life. Nature also captures the beauty of the natural world through gorgeous and realistic artwork. Working with artists who take this mission seriously was crucial for a series famed for its strong thematic links grounded in biological science.

In the Nature: Flight module, players find freedom by soaring to the skies, where safety and abundance await those gifted with wings. Lauren Helton, a biologist and scientific illustrator, brings this module to life by depicting birds in their natural habitat. All the birds depicted are from a region between Nepal and northern Vietnam. We sat down with Lauren to learn more about her process and work on Nature: Flight. Enjoy!

Hi Lauren! You've illustrated some incredible bird art in Nature. What do you love about illustrating the natural world?

This very thing - and birds in particular - is what has inspired my art since childhood. I am a bird biologist, and in fact, I am currently writing this from a field site in Yosemite, where I am training a new bird banding crew to collect data on our 30+ year project monitoring passerine populations and long-term trends in birds of the park. Birds are probably the first ever thing I drew once I was able to hold a pencil, and capturing their forms and behavior continues to inspire me.

One of my favorite cards that ties nicely into my work is the Faraway Place, the tropical island where the birds in the game can escape to. Unlike the rest of the cards, this is distant from South and Southeast Asia - this is where birds find a place lush with resources, a safe haven to stop and refuel on their long journeys. The island on the card is a real location - Bird Island, Saipan, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. This is not only a real place, it's a place I have visited many times over the years for bird research with the Institute for Bird Populations. In the image are seabirds that frequent this location - Black Noddies, Red- and White-tailed Tropicbirds, a few White Terns. These are all birds that spend long amounts of time foraging out at sea, where life can be difficult and dangerous. Bird Island is a refuge where humans are forbidden so that they can safely retreat to its rocky faces for a safe place to rest and to build nests and raise young.
(illustration of the card can go here but also one of my irl photos of Bird Island)

I tend not to focus as much on storytelling or emotion-inspiring as some artists, although I think people will find their own meaning in the images and I love that! My primary aim is always to depict the birds doing what birds naturally do, showing how they look in the wild, because the science of wild birds is what inspires me the most in my personal life whether it comes to art or my career in field biology.

What was your process for creating the art of Nature?

The art for Nature came together out of a combination of ideas from Dominic, Anthony, and me, all based on what would look visually interesting while also being a great example of the traits we wanted to convey. All of the birds in Nature are species from Nepal through northern Vietnam, and I assembled reference photos for those species, their environments, and sometimes other figures (like the cat in Camouflage) before sketching digitally. Most of the original sketches align very closely with the finished illustrations.

Research was helpful to work out which plant species could be both visually attractive and also seen in association with the birds on the cards - Bombax ceiba was in the background of a few Indochinese Green-Magpie photos I had found in the Macaulay Library (operated by Cornell, a library of photos, sounds, and videos of birds all around the world) for example, and I loved the look of those big red flowers to accent the brightly-colored bird. Similarly, finding a great bird for Seed Dispersal meant looking around at birds that eat lots of seeds, and the seed-loving Yellow-breasted Greenfinch felt like a fun fit here with all of those waving seedheads and grasses in the background against the bright blue of the card backdrop. Many of the photos of them on Macaulay included a purple-petaled flower, which I added to the card for a pop of complementary color. (example image in Macaulay)

What inspired your Nature box cover artwork?

The main idea we wanted for the cover was something vibrant and colorful which would not only draw the eye but would show a bird in flight, wings spread, with a big blue sky - something that gives a sense of freedom of movement, something beautiful that inspires happiness and other sorts of positive feelings rather than, perhaps, the cold bitterness of the tundra or the drama and danger of the Jurassic.

Given the geographic location of Nepal through Vietnam, there were so many brilliantly colorful birds to choose from, but many of those birds are more colorful from the back than from the belly. The Indochinese Green-Magpie, however, is a rainbow of color from all angles, and the bright reds and yellows with the lime green and vivid pink of its beak are all eye-catching colors against a blue sky. Thankfully this is a clever, gregarious species that isn't too afraid of people who live in its range, so there are lots of excellent photos to use for reference from this angle! They're incredibly charming, gorgeous birds - I hope I get to see one in person some day, and I hope that the cover makes you feel the same way about them!

How did you bring a feeling of life to the species in your Nature art?

Birds make this quite easy! They're such active, intelligent animals and in keeping with the general theme of Flight, a lot of them are in motion on the cards. The Indochinese Green-Magpie has its wings spread wide as it prepares to land near the viewer, the Bar-headed Geese are all flying in a flock high above those Himalayan peaks. As mentioned above, I certainly do use reference images to get an idea of the posture of the bird doing the behavior that I want to depict. And not to talk up the Macaulay Library too much, but as an art resource it's fantastic because many photographers have made use of the library's ability to tag photos with not just species, age, and sex, but also behaviors such as "flying" or "foraging".

https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/205830911 (Bar-headed Geese in flight)

When possible I like to use dynamic angles and postures - 3/4 angles are nice for this, like with those geese. Facing toward the viewer slightly helps them feel less static as they move across the sky, with their wings all at slightly different points of their stroke through the air.

Or, in the case of the greenfinch, the seeds it is dropping from its beak trail across the foreground of the image, getting larger and more detailed as they move closer to the viewer. And the cat in camouflage, meanwhile, is the one in motion with one paw raised in the air while it stalks the quiet hidden nightjar in the foreground.

Worlds to Explore

Nature is a modular game system that allows you to create and explore a unique ecosystem each time you play. Play Nature without modules, or add and combine modules to create over 20 unique ecosystems! Nature, Flight, and Jurassic launch in US retail on July 31st, with more modules to follow!