Lion Equals Square

“Having played a lot of Katamari Damacy back in college, I wanted to do a piece that paid tribute to the game’s specific brand of weirdness. I sketched out a number of thumbnails, but everyone immediately gravitated towards the trompe l’oeil effect of the Prince rolling up his own poster.

Since the game diligently catalogues every item you roll up, I wanted to make sure everything I drew into the Katamari was something directly out of the game: the merman, the dog with fleas, the inexplicably still-lit campfire. I did a quick 3D mockup in Maya with a bunch of cubes just to get a rough layout for the sphere, and then went to work replaying the game on my Switch and filling in as many specific objects as was humanly possible.”