Ossi Hiekkala is a Finnish illustrator with roughly twenty years in the trade. He works under the studio name Archipictor, and his stated specialties run to characters, food, history, and storytelling. His commercial portfolio is broad: advertisements, packaging, board games, editorials, and book and roleplaying covers, with clients including Chaosium (RuneQuest), Stonemaier Games, UNICEF Finland, and Finnish magazines like Tiede. He normally paints digitally. For Sorcery, he didn't.
That switch is the whole story of his contribution to the game. Sorcery: Contested Realm is built on a single hard rule about its art: every card is made with traditional techniques, no digital paintings allowed. When that brief reached Hiekkala, it sent him back to gouache on illustration board. He has called the result a return rather than a chore. "There is something magical about that brush's contact with the illustration board," he wrote of the work, framing the tactile experience as something digital tools can't replicate.
Style
Hiekkala paints in gouache for his Sorcery cards, an opaque water-based paint that gives flat, controlled color and a slightly matte, illustrative finish. The look is deliberately period. He draws his inspiration from roughly 1900 to 1970: women's magazines of the 1950s and 60s, mid-century advertising art, and old paperback covers. That sensibility reads clearly across the table. His cards have a classic, almost vintage-storybook quality rather than the heavy oil-painted drama some of the roster's other names bring.
It suits the subject matter he was handed. A lot of his Sorcery work is the connective tissue of the game: wizards at various ranks, settlers, a survey crew, a trebuchet, crabs in the sedge. These are not splashy Avatar portraits. They are the small, characterful scenes that make the world feel populated, and the warm, illustrative gouache treatment is exactly the register that kind of card wants. His one genuinely eerie piece, Sisters of Silence, shows the same restraint working in a colder key.
Cards on Sorcery
Collector Arthouse's artist page credits Hiekkala with 15 cards spanning Alpha, Beta, and Arthurian Legends:
- Apprentice Wizard
- Crown Prince
- Frontier Settlers
- Grandmaster Wizard
- Land Surveyor
- Lightning Bolt
- Lookout
- Overbearing Bailiff
- Payload Trebuchet
- Recall
- Rescue
- Sedge Crabs
- Shameless Squire
- Sisters of Silence
- Swan Maidens
A note on names: Hiekkala's own studio blog, posted while the work was in progress, lists the pieces under earlier working titles — Thunderbolt, Master Wizard, Royal Survey, Instant Recall, Trebuchet, Secret Council, Thundercloud. Those map onto the shipped names above (Lightning Bolt, Grandmaster Wizard, Land Surveyor, Recall, Payload Trebuchet, and so on); the Collector Arthouse list reflects the final printed cards and is the one to trust for the current card pool.
Sisters of Silence is the most-documented single piece of his Sorcery output. Collector Arthouse ran a "Behind The Art" feature on it, and it's a good showcase for what he brings: a quiet, classic, faintly unsettling composition that fits its gameplay — a card that suppresses fighting and spellcasting in its vicinity. Lightning Bolt is the other card worth flagging, both as one of his signature pieces and as a card the publisher itself has written about in a designer diary tracing the spell's history.
Where to see more Ossi
- archipictor.com — his personal portfolio under the Archipictor studio name, including a 2020 blog post specifically about his Sorcery work and the move back to gouache.
- Collector Arthouse — Ossi Hiekkala — the canonical community archive's artist page, with his full 15-card Sorcery list.
- Behind The Art: Sisters of Silence — a dedicated feature on one of his best-known Sorcery cards.
Sources
- Collector Arthouse — Ossi Hiekkala — primary source for the biographical sketch (Finnish illustrator, ~20 years, characters/food/history/storytelling, advertising/packaging/board-game/editorial/book work) and the canonical 15-card Sorcery list across Alpha, Beta, and Arthurian Legends
- Archipictor — Sorcery: Contested Realm — the artist's own account of painting the cards in gouache, the "brush's contact with the illustration board" quote, the traditional-only art brief, and the in-progress working titles
- archipictor.com — personal portfolio, source for the Archipictor studio name and client list (Chaosium/RuneQuest, Stonemaier Games, UNICEF Finland, Finnish magazines)
- Behind The Art: Sisters of Silence (Collector Arthouse) — feature on the Sisters of Silence card, its classic look, and its gameplay effect, plus his 1900–1970 inspiration window
- Designer Diary: The Path of a Lightning Bolt (sorcerytcg.com) — publisher designer diary referencing the Lightning Bolt card