About me:

I am a professional illustrator and game-industry Art Director from Oakland, California, USA. My expertise is with strong, colorful engaging work with a lot of personality (and I especially love drawing animals, fantasy and science fiction themes, and anything character-driven.) I primarily work digitally, and I enjoy developing character-driven pieces, especially humorous ones.

© Michael Dashow except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

portrait

A cartoony portrait of the artist.

In 2022, tabletop gaming company Ravensburger asked me to create all of the art for ‘Goats’ Day Out,’ a game for their ThinkFun division, a fun family game about a bunch of ravenous goats loose in the city and eating everything in sight. For this game, I created the cover art along with six player goat cards (each of which had to accommodate a space to place tiles in each one’s belly.) Then there were the dozens of different objects that the goats would eat, all designed to fit into tetromino shapes which the players would try to place in their goats’ bellies.The game was released in 2023.

A mock-up of a middle-grade children's book about a struggling but well-meaning human magic apprentice at a magic school in the woods whose student body and faculty are mainly animals.
The book series is entirely made up, and only exists and a portfolio piece to demonstrate my work. I created both the illustration and all of the graphic design.

I created this short children’s book as part of a group project on Instagram, where the hosts wrote an eight-page story and invited other artists to illustrate it however they wished. This was my take on the story of Little Witch, who receives and invitation to and prepares to attend the Midsummer Night Festival.While many other artists chose the traditional witch setting of a forest, I instead decided to go with a more urban sitting, trying to inject something modern, fresh and relatable into the visual approach to the story. The setting is based on my location, Oakland and San Francisco, California. (In fact, all of the herbs that Little Witch uses in her hat are all ones that grow locally here in the Bay Area!)

I spent a good chunk of 2018 creating concept artwork for Akili Interactive’s flagship game Endeavor RX, a digital medicine application that helps treat ADHD in children. The product is targeted at kids ages ~8-12 and is set in outer space. I had the privilege of creating many different kinds of alien characters for the game. All of these would eventually be modeled in 3D by an external company, so I needed to be very precise with my guides about how each strange character would be modeled, rigged, textured and animated. Here are some of the alien Ambassadors from the game.