Gears for Breakfast Holiday Gift Box Commission, September 2025
This summer I had the immensely fun opportunity to work with Gears for Breakfast to make illustrations for this year's holiday chocolate gift box!
I had the pleasure of meeting Sara Holmes at TennoCon 2025 and it was there where she proposed this project to me! My friends have been big fans of A Hat in Time since high school, so getting to make work for the studio behind it, especially through a (primarily) Warframe event, was certainly unexpected and a joy! Funny enough, I was the only one in that friend group to not have played the game, so at the beginning of the commission process I played through the base game and fell in love with it! It's seriously so good!!
Predictably, my favorite character from A Hat in Time ended up being The Snatcher, so much of our ideation included him in some way. The goal of the piece was to depict a cozy holiday environment with food, and I eventually landed on the idea of Snatcher working a kitchen alongside Hat Kid and Bow Kid, having been inspired by his iconic "KILL the chef" apron (which I first spotted here in the summer 2023 event promo art). In regards to what food he would be making, I referenced the Gears for Breakfast logo of a gear-shaped eggs, pancake, and pineapple slice in a frying pan, as this was a celebration for the studio after all!
Part of this commission was also the creation of eleven simple vector icons for the chocolates to be molded into. This was my first time using Inkscape, after having a bit of experience using Adobe Illustrator in school. It was definitely a different art process than I'm used to, but I'm fairly happy with the results and how they came out in the chocolates!
Huge thank you to Sara Holmes for extending this opportunity to me and for being a very communicative and gracious client! And thanks to Gears for Breakfast for making such a fun game :)
Final box illustration.
Photo of the shipped chocolate box with the printed illustration.
Vector icons arranged on the provided carved chocolate pieces guide/template.
Photo of the shipped chocolates, with the icons I made interspersed with "happy holidays" in various languages. The centerpiece chocolate has the box illustration printed on it in edible ink.
Box illustration 1 minute timelapse.
Alternate rough sketch used for the holiday card where everything is on fire and everyone is having a bad time (except Snatcher of course). This was agreed to be a bad idea for the box art.
The alternate rough sketch was instead used for the holiday card that came with the box, so the idea still got to live on in some way.
Other rough sketch made exploring the concept of multiple scenes depicted in photos on a fridge.
Also made a version with Snatcher there. Because of course.
Altered rough sketch to remove the fire, as it was unanimously agreed it might send the wrong message in the final box illustration.
Sketch WIP with various notes before moving into cleaner linework.
Mostly finalized linework WIP.
Color flats WIP.
Beginning of rendering progress.
Bonus Snatcher doodles made when I was first contacted about the commission, here at the end of the Artstation post as a reward for scrolling all the way to the bottom :)