Herald of the Fair

As with every Magic expansion, there is a story that goes along with Kaladesh, and that story centers on an inventors' fair. Machines and contraptions of all kinds are on display and the world is abuzz over the new technology on offer. Standing above the throngs of citizens eager to take a gander at the latest and greatest devices on offer stands the the Herald of the Fair. Equal parts salesmen, town crier, and circus ringleader, he directs the masses and keeps them abreast of each day's events. At least, that's my take on him. I'm sure there's a lot more to him. Or not. But for the purposes of the depiction I was asked to make, that's about all I needed to be concerned about.

The vast majority of illustration work I do for Magic requires little in the way of really deep thought or conceptualization. Many of the images I create can simply be boiled down to figuring out what elements need to be included (often times this is made clear in the art description provided by Wizards of the Coast—complete with reference images or styleguide page numbers that lead me to those reference images), figuring out the priority of those elements (this is usually pretty clearly indicated by the aforementioned art descriptions), arranging those elements in a way that I (and hopefully the fine folks at Wizards) find interesting, and finally making the image. Most of the time, all I need to know is in the styleguide. Sure I'll supplement that with additional reference imagery that I dig up or photograph myself, but the vast majority of the design choices are already made by the time I get my assignment.

Herald of the Fair is no different from such cases and thus is as simple as they come. The art description (which again I failed to save), asked for a man standing above a crowd of people beckoning them to enter a large building or arena to see the wonders of the fair. He needed to be speaking into a device that amplifies his voice in some way. Images of how he would be dressed were provided (though I got to make a few minor aesthetic choices), and his location was also made clear (though that ended up being a bit more generalized for the purposes of the piece).

Taking that art order, I looked at the various pieces and assembled them thusly:

©Wizards of the Coast

Despite lacking any kind of detail in the crowd, this piece was approved.

While I don't do this all the time, in this case I printed the sketch out as a monochrome image (I think it was reddish-brown) on watercolor paper. I then take that printed sketch and paste it down onto a piece of hardboard. The printed sketch is then sealed with several layers of matte acrylic medium which I'll sand down when dry to a relatively smooth surface. Then it's ready to be painted on with oils.

Here's how the painting came out.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished piece measures fourteen inches wide by eleven inches tall.

One will note immediately that there are some obvious differences between sketch and finish. For one, the herald now has a sash. I think he was always meant to, but I'd forgotten to put one on in the sketch and the Art Director somehow missed it. I ended up double-checking with the Art Director in the midst of painting the piece and learned that my suspicions were correct, so I included one. Additionally, there are some minor architecture changes in the background that I felt necessary as I fleshed the piece out (a better way to put this might be that I made the scribbles into architecture). Beyond that, I ended up tweaking the herald's pose a bit to make him a bit (mostly the hands) to push him a bit more toward performer. Pretty nit-picky stuff, but I somehow felt it all necessary at the time.

Anyway, as with much of my work I handed the piece in and sort of forgot about it. The painting sat in my flat files for about a year waiting for the set to be revealed. When Wizards of the Coast began to ramp up promotion for the set, I was surprised and amazed to find that the herald was featured in the set's video trailer. Not only was he featured, but he moved and talked. Pretty weird to see something I've done come alive to that extent. And a little unsettling. But hey, I'll take it.

Demolish

I've had the distinct pleasure of being a part of several concept teams over the years that have helped build some of Magic's many worlds. The plane of Kaladesh was one such opportunity, and while it wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse aesthetically, I did a niche to explore: the gremlins. The gremlins were something I worked quite hard on and though the finalized versions printed in the Kaladesh styleguide ended up having very minor differences to my original designs in the end, they were still very much mine.

Funny enough, the design itself isn't exactly out of the ordinary—frankly, the gremlins ended up looking a lot like baby aardvarks—but they took a bit of a winding path to get there. Originally, my designs were deemed to goblin-like, which was a problem because the gremlins really needed to be distinctly separate from goblins. What Art Director Jeremy Jarvis wanted to get across with the design was that these things caused damage but did so without any intent or malice. Destruction was just a side effect of their being. That sentiment immediately led me down the path that produced the first drawing of a gremlin:

©Wizards of the Coast

Sure, things evolved from there (I ended up giving them another pair of legs, bigger eyes, different proportions and various color treatments), but this was how they started, and from there I got to explore them quite a bit.

I'll be getting to those explorations in a future post, but for now here are two important things to understand about Kaladesh and its gremlins: first, in the world of Kaladesh all of the machines, vehicles and contraptions runs on this magical element called "aether" that swirls about in the sky and is harvested by great airships. This aether is blue and glowy, and it is the thing upon which gremlins feed. Second, as stated above, gremlins destroy things and do so unintentionally—they're probably not even aware that they're doing it. As the design evolved, it was decided that gremlins secrete an acidic and corrosive oil from their skin and this is what does all the damage. This corrosion is typically indicated by a purple and green crust that forms on metal.

Anyway, after working so hard on the little guys it should be no surprise that when one of the Art Directors inquired as to whether I had any requests for assignments that requested a gremlin. And a gremlin is what I got in Demolish.

For some reason during this period of time I was out of the habit of saving my actual assignment descriptions, but this one I remember fairly well. I was asked to paint a gremlin laying in the remains of a mechanical construct called the Chief of the Foundry. The gremlin, having just fed on the aether running the device, has a telltale glow and sits among the wreckage as the remaining aether dissipates around him.

Pretty simple in concept, honestly. In delivery, however, I knew it would be a bit of a challenge. The primary cause of this challenge is that mechanical constructs really aren't my strong suit. I mean, it's a lot of straight lines, gears, and reflective metal. I knew I could do it, but I also knew it would be a heck of a time investment to really make the image sing. Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about so many specifics in the sketch. I knew pretty quickly what I wanted to do with it and tore through my preliminary quickly in order to give myself as much time as possible on the finished painting.

©Wizards of the Coast

The advantage of getting away with sketches like this is that I get to merely indicate aspects of the mechanical construct rather than fully articulating them. While there are some recognizable shapes in there, the rest is just scribbles. I knew I'd have to reconcile that when the time came to paint the piece, but for the time being I was just hoping the fine folks at Wizards liked where I was headed. Fortunately they were. Unfortunately, I was once again reminded of how not having everything planned can sometimes be a headache.

The thing is, the style guide for a world like this has a wealth of information. It had examples of decorative gears, various types of filigree, and even basic shape language. I knew that in order to keep the construct feeling like the Chief of the Foundry, that I needed to nail a few key components. So, I kept the head and chest plate in as well as a few legs and hip joints. Then I started adding additional parts of the creature's design jumbled together. Beyond that I really didn't know what to do. Deconstructing something like this is pretty beyond me so in order to figure it all out I started asking some serious questions like: do these things need wires? I mean, they don't run on electricity, they run on aether so does that even require wiring of any kind? What about pistons? How do the joints work? Etc., etc., etc.

While there is a degree of importance to making it feel believable, it took a long time to realize that I was probably overthinking things. After all, I'm not an engineer and these questions were just a distraction. Answering them was only tangential to the success of the piece. In the end, my biggest issues would come from how reflective to make the metal and how accurate the reflections needed to be. I discovered the solution to those issues as I painted. Because of the jumbled nature of the construct's remains, I found that the more accurate and reflective the metal became, the more difficult it became to read the piece. It became harder and harder to see the larger shapes among all the reflections. Luckily, the gremlin was always easy to see given how different he is from the metal, but much of the construct's remains became visual noise that I decided I needed to quiet down and simplify.

So, what started as a panic to try and figure out the inner-workings of a fictional, aether/mechanical-driven construct ended up being about paring things down and making things readable. In doing this, I effectively painted much of the piece twice.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished painting is oil on paper on hardboard and measures sixteen inches wide by twelve inches tall.

One of the saving graces of this painting is that the various elements I was asked to include in the piece had relatively limited palettes. The construct was sort of a brass color with red and blue accents. The gremlin was a pinkish color with purple accents and its corrosion the aforementioned green/purple. The aether was vibrant blue. These few colors in their variations meant that the piece could be accomplished with a relatively limited palette. It also meant that I could utilize things like the red accents on the metal and the purple of the corrosion to move the viewer's eye around the composition. Lastly, the shock of bright blue juxtaposed next to the bright, fleshy pink was really valuable in terms of hammering home a focal point.

In a very real way, this piece probably represents the most effort I've ever put into a Magic painting. There's a lot of stuff in there and the fact that I ended up reworking vast areas of the piece meant it ate up a fair amount of time. That I struggled with it and came away with something I actually like is no small miracle to me. So often I have a difficult time getting past the adversity I experience in the making of a thing and end up with strong negative associations. This one, though, felt like a real win—even at the time.

Tangleclaw Werewolf, Fibrous Entangler

As part of the concepting team that brought world of Innistrad to life back in May of 2010, I did not expect to get a chance to revisit that world beyond in the assignments to come. I figured that upon completing my last piece for that expansion block of Magic, I would be done with that world of gothic horror forever. I was wrong. Magic would return to Innistrad, and while I was not officially on the concept team for this new sojourn, I ended up contributing a few things since I happened to be in the Wizards of the Coast office for something completely unrelated. I also got to paint a few things. Here is a tale of two of those paintings.

One of the new card types Magic introduced in the original Innistrad block were double-faced cards for changeling creatures. On one side would be Dr. Jekyll, on the other, Mr. Hyde. In this case (as in many others), the double-faced card represented a werewolf. In the first go around with Innistrad, I got to do art for one of these (link). This time, however, the art would require something a bit different. The starting point would be the wolf rather than the human, and card's other face would reveal the horror that that wolf would become.

While I could go on about Magic's storyline and the implications for the sets "Shadows Over Innistrad" and "Eldritch Moon," suffice it to say that this return to Innistrad reveals that something has entered that world and has begun to change it. People and creatures are becoming deformed, buildings are changing shape, tentacle-like vines are cropping up everywhere. There is clearly something more horrifying than usual going on. The result being that much of the art done for these bits of story required some pretty weird deviations to the usual Innistrad nightmares.

Anyway, I seem to have lost my art descriptions on these two but as memory serves, in the first piece I was asked to paint a werewolf with some minor, subtle deformities in an alley. Perhaps there might be some people running for their lives. In the second piece, I was asked to depict the horrifying, tentacle-covered creature that that werewolf turned into about to pounce on a villager. This horror needed to be somewhat recognizable as having been a werewolf at some point. Seemed pretty clear to me, and so I went to work.

©Wizards of the Coast

Here's our werewolf with a few elongated fingers and hints of tentacles in his fur.

©Wizards of the Coast

And here's our horror, lunging at a poor villager.

The Art Director approved the werewolf piece, but felt I could push the horror further. It was decided that the creature felt too much like a werewolf, and so I was asked to give it another go.

©Wizards of the Coast

This one, they liked and they gave me the green light.

©Wizards of the Coast

Here's the finished Tangleclaw Werewolf. The painting is oil on paper on hardboard and it measures twelve inches wide by nine inches tall.

©Wizards of the Coast

Here's the finished Fibrous Entangler. The painting is also oil on paper on hardboard and measures twelve inches wide by sixteen inches tall.

Looking at these pieces, I don't have a lot to say. I don't have any distinct memories of working on either one and I remember them being pretty straightforward. The only thing that really sticks out at me on these pieces is how dark I got with both of them. I treated them more graphically from the start and I feel like that's somehow evident even in the finish. Normally it takes me a while to build up to the level of darkness seen in this work, but I remember going for those darks pretty early in the painting process. Maybe it was the gothic horror aspect of it, maybe it was the digital color studies I'd done, or maybe these pieces were just in my comfort zone. Whatever the case, they came pretty easily for me, which is unusual.

In the end, I'm pretty pleased with how both paintings came out. Subject matter-wise, they have a pretty small audience and probably aren't the kind of thing most folks want to hang in their house, but that's hardly the concern of the assignment. Whatever the case, they're done and out there, and I get to move on.

Fevered Visions

I've failed miserably at posting regularly on this blog. Honestly, I can't really say what has kept me from keeping up to date for most of this year, but I know that I've gotten other stuff done along the way. I updated my website, built a store there, got a few things done around the house, and even got to go on vacation. Beyond that, though, it's been a bit of an off year for me to this point, and the blog has suffered. However, I shall endeavor to finish the year strong and bring the content up to the present in the coming weeks. That all starts here. With Fevered Visions.

So, Fevered Visions. It went pretty smoothly and had virtually no twists and turns. I got my assignment, did my sketch and painted the picture. As usual, we'll start with the assignment:

ART DESCRIPTION:Setting: INNISTRADColor: Blue and red spellLocation: See belowAction: This spell represents a cultist going mad from the influence of cosmic truths. One way to show this might be: show a close-up of a man's face, a terrified expression on his face. He's floating in an insane nonsensical landscape -- it looks like the inside of a massive brain, and tentacle-like neurons squirm around him, mimicking the look of Emrakul lattice. Maybe his eye sockets are empty, and we can see the lattice shapes inside his empty head, as well. Is this a glimpse inside the truth of reality, or has he gone totally bonkers? OR BOTH?

I read the above and somehow ignored it. Well, I ignored bits of it. When presented with a description like this, I tend to spend a lot more time thinking about it than actually drawing it up. I start out by reading the description a bunch of times and then walk away and let it sink in. Maybe mull some of it over. After a time, I'll begin to ask myself a series of questions about the piece in order to prioritize aspects of it, and better understand how I want to attack it. In this case, I asked things like: How close are we to the figure? How am I going to show an empty head? How do I even begin to touch on some of the abstract themes mentioned with a single image?

For me, the idea for the piece came together once I settled upon two things. First, I decided not to bother showing that the head was empty. I wasn't really interested in doing yet another body horror piece, and I felt it was going to be a bit difficult to truly pull off at card size when the environment itself seemed to be more vital to the image as a whole. Second, I decided that the piece needed a way to connect the space and the mental states described in the art order in order to get at the core of the concept. For me, the obvious way to make that connection was through the eyes.

Once I'd figured out the solution to the problem, the rest of the piece was pretty academic. The shape language of Emrakul's lattice is not actually too different from how neurons are actually shaped, so making that connection was easy. Beyond that, it was just a matter of figuring out the best way to present the whole thing. Here are the sketches I turned in:

©Wizards of the Coast

Upon doing the bottom version, it became instantly clear that it was a lesser image. Somehow, despite showing more of the face and hammering home the expression of horror, the idea itself felt watered down. Also, the sketch felt to visually connected to Duress, a piece I did years ago that had no connective tissue to this piece. Still, I'd bothered to make the sketch, and so I submitted it.

This was a bad idea.

There is a common school of thought throughout illustration that if an illustrator submits multiple sketches, the Art Director (or editor, or committee) will invariably chose the one the illustrator likes the least. The best way to combat this is for the illustrator to give them only sketches of things that the illustrator wants to actually paint. By submitting this second sketch, I opened myself up to the possibility of having to paint something I was unhappy with from the outset, and that is truly a miserable experience. Fortunately, the Art Director in this case was smarter than me and the first sketch was the one that was approved.

So I took it to paint.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished painting is oil on paper on hardboard and measures fourteen inches wide by eleven inches tall.

This assignment was one of an increasingly rare breed where I got to do some deeper problem solving. The piece could have been a dude floating in space amidst a web of neuron lattice with maybe a hint of that lattice within. That might have been a fine painting, and indeed there are some who would have knocked that piece out of the park. For me, though, that image fell short of addressing the mental state. I needed to find a way to allow the viewer to more directly ponder whether the man has plugged into something deeper, or whether the whole thing is of his own creation. The resulting painting is probably no less distressing than that other version, but I think it ended up being more about the question than the man.

The Sword of Feast and Famine

The Sword of Feast and Famine is likely the highest profile piece I've ever done in the eleven years that I've worked on Magic. Sure, other cards I've done art for are more ubiquitous, but this one has had greater fan and collector interest than pretty much anything else I've ever done. One might think that because of the card's weight, the assignment would bring with it an extra degree of pressure and stress. Honestly, though, I didn't feel it. Maybe I should have. In truth, I approached this piece the same way I might approach any other.

Normally, I'd start out with art description, but the art description contains a lot of stuff I'd end up having to explain and so I'm just going to cut to the chase and give the explanation. Story-wise, we find the world of Kaladesh in the middle of the Inventor's Fair. Widgets and doodads of all varieties are on display for all of Kaladesh's citizens to peruse and consider. The Sword of Feast and Famine is one such item and I was asked to portray the sword sitting on a stand in a display. The sword was to be elven in make and design and so would be made of both wood and metal. The metal would be near black in its darkness, the wood alive and flourishing.

The shape of the sword was based largely on the ground work done by the team of concept artists that created the world-guide. Elvish motifs and design were fleshed out quite clearly and it was pretty easy to extrapolate the sword's look. Beyond that, I decided that rather than living wood, vines might be a better way to make clear the contrast to the deadly metal blade. In my thinking, vines provided two advantages: 1) I could more densely concentrate lots of living leaves and greenery in order to hammer home the life/death contrast, and 2) vines provided a means of transitioning from one material to another more easily. Sure, I could have integrated wood pieces throughout the sword, but I felt the contrast between the black blade and living plant life was visually a bit too stark and could benefit from a greater degree of nuance. So, being able to wind vines throughout felt more advantageous in that respect.

Additionally, the vines afforded me a small story-telling opportunity in that I could show them becoming less healthy as they approached the blade. Given that the healthiest vines exist at the hilt of the sword, one could go as far as to say that the hilt and its connection to the living wielder represents life and the blade, death. No new ground broken in any of that, nor is the idea particularly deep, so I totally understand if you're rolling your eyes at this point. But it ended up being a part of the thinking that went into the piece.

Outside of the sword, I had to make decisions about the environment and the display. Given that the sword is elvish I though it would be a good idea to reflect that in the design of the stand, as well. Rather than living wood I used dead, sculpted wood (which I guess you could say is dead because it made contact with the sword?) in order to keep the greenery where it was most important. After arranging the elements I had, I ended up with a pretty balanced composition and I decided to double down on that with a symmetrical backdrop of curtain and metal filigree.

This is the sketch that resulted:

©Wizards of the Coast

As you can see, the sketch is digital. Increasingly I've abandoned traditional sketching for assignments for the digital alternative. While it's disappointing to collectors, I have to say that the speed with which I can ideate and create alternative designs is something I rather enjoy. Perhaps I'll return to sketching traditionally sometime in the future, but for now I feel it's working rather well for me. If nothing else, it affords a quick means of doing color and value studies.

Anyway, the above sketch was approved. Here's how the piece came out:

©Wizards of the Coast

Above is the image as I submitted to Wizards. Some of those who've seen the resulting card online have inquired about whether there was any digital trickery used in the making of the image. My answer to that is yes and no. Digitizing any painting—be it through a digital camera or scanner—can be a bit tricky. Minimally, there is a need to do some color adjustments to make the digital image match the painting. For my work, there's often a need to retouch little ridges of paint in brush strokes that catch the light and cause tiny reflections in the file. It's painstaking work, but very necessary. Beyond that, I might do a bit of tweaking, like making an area darker or brighter depending on what might help make a piece read better when it's reduced to card size. That is the case with this piece. There were a few metal reflections that I painted in oil that I later found to be distracting and I dialed them down a bit in Photoshop. Later, I glazed the painting to match. Here's what the painting itself now looks like:

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished image is oil on hardboard and measures fourteen inches wide by eighteen inches tall.

The very decorative world of Kaladesh has many challenges inherent to it. The biggest of these in this context, is the fact that the world is so heavily adorned with filigree, that it's potentially difficult to show that one thing is more important than another. For this piece, I tried to keep the filigree to a relative minimum, make the shapes nice and large, and compose in a very simple and instantly readable manner.

In the end, I'm pretty happy with how this one came out. I like the overall contrast between the red/brown piece and the shock of green. I like the isolated black shape in the middle of the piece. And despite its triteness, I like the bit of storytelling with the dying vines. I only wish that that bit of storytelling read better when shrunken down. I think it's probable that however I tried to deliver that message, it would have gotten a little lost at card size. Even were this idea presented in a film, it likely would be been done with a closeup. Fortunately, anyone who sees the painting in person can get up close to it and do that part themselves.

From Under the Floorboards

During Magic: the Gathering's first visit to Innistrad, arguably one of my more successful pieces was a little painting of a zombie called, Gravecrawler. At least I think so. Sure, it's horrifying. Sure, it's disgusting. Sure, it reveals how warped my mind can be sometimes. But, boy was I happy with how that one came out. The finished piece was about as close as I'd ever come to recreating what I originally saw in my head. So, when I was asked to do a new painting of zombies for Shadow's Over Innistrad, I was practically vibrating in place. Unfortunately the finish didn't quite make it to the level of Gravecrawler, but there's some fun stuff going on in From Under the Floorboards. And there's even a bit more fun that didn't make it into the card.

As usual, it all started with an art order:

ART DESCRIPTION:

Setting: INNISTRAD

Color: Black spell

Location: Some interior location with wood floors (see below)

Action: Some creeping vines have weakened the wood floorboards of an old mausoleum or church. The floorboards fall away, and out of the hole crawls three zombies. The zombies clamber their way up out of the rotten-wood pit, hungry for the flesh of the living.

Seemed simple enough, so I went to sketch and here's how that came out:

©Wizards of the Coast

To a certain extent, I thought it would be fun to reference Gravecrawler in the central zombie. It wouldn't be an explicit tie-in and is by no means canon, but I was hoping to channel on some level a degree of the success I'd had in the previous piece. I got approval for this, and went to paint.

As I reached the middle of the painting process, for some reason I started to think about the description. "Three zombies," it said. While there were only three main zombies in my sketch, there were others insinuated. What if there was an explicit reason for there to be three zombies? What if it was part of the card's mechanic? I decided it was a good idea to shoot my art director an e-mail for clarification. It was a good catch. Three was the number we wanted to count to, with the number of counting being three. And so I eliminated most of the additional zombies, save one. The last I removed digitally.

Here's the piece as I turned it in.

©Wizards of the Coast

There's a fair bit of digital trickery going on in the painting you see above. First, and most importantly, I painted out the one, additional zombie and added a bit of debris in his place. Second, I recognized that the vines were too thin to be legible at card size, so I fattened them up a bit. I was pleased enough with how these thicker vines came out that I ended up going back into the original painting to do the same. Overall, I was pretty proud of my ability to blend the digital with the traditional. But honestly, it wasn't that difficult a job to begin with. Either way, if the folks at Wizards noticed, they never said a word. In fact, they approved it as is.

Still, I really missed the zombie in the sketch whose head is just beginning to rise above the floor level. He's barely more than a shape, but there was something about him that amused me, and so I kept him. Here's what the the original painting looks like with that zombie still included:

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished piece is twelve inches wide by nine inches tall and is oil on hardboard.

This was one of the most difficult pieces to color correct that I've ever painted. Seriously. It took forever. It's still not 100% right, but it's as close as I've been able to get with what Photoshop skills I had at the time. Upon rescanning the piece for this blog post, I took another shot at it and got a bit closer. So, I guess maybe my skills have sharpened a bit since last year.

If I had any complaints about the piece it's that it feels a bit murkier than I'd like it to. For whatever reason, I went darker faster than I usually do. In fact, it got dark enough that I'm fairly sure it wasn't really necessary to paint out the extra zombie at all. Seriously—he's hardly visible. The piece is dark enough, in fact, that I fear I may have undermined any figure/ground separation that might have helped the image read clearly when shrunken down.

Additionally, from a purely artistic level, this is a rare occasion where I feel like more would have been better. Zombies? More zombies! Debris? More debris! Let's just pile it on! Unfortunately, while that might have made for a more interesting piece to me, it would have failed to solve the needs of the assignment. After all, three was the important number here. Still, it would have been a lot of fun to paint even more zombies bursting out of that hole.

All that being said, I still dig the piece quite a bit. It's weird and fun, and pretty creepy. It's not exactly reinventing the wheel or telling any epic story. It's just zombie's busting out of the floor. But what fun it is to paint such things. Still more fun is that I'm never working on anything long enough to grow tired of it. One job is a mythical landscape, the next a mad scientist. Then it's on to zombies.

This gig can be stupid levels of awesome.

Invasive Surgery

In the past couple of years, Magic has revisited a number of its worlds and for the first time, Magic's storyline has returned to a world I helped build: Innistrad. Once again the game would explore the gothic horror genre and while I wasn't deeply involved as a part of the world-building team for the story's expansion, I was pretty excited about getting a chance to dig into the weird and wonderful plane, its brooding atmosphere, and it's varied inhabitants.

Invasive Surgery — the first piece assigned to me — was a great opportunity to dive into the deep end of the horror inherent to Innistrad, and I was ready to roll up my sleeves.

ART DESCRIPTION:

Setting: INNISTRAD

Location: In a mad scientist's lab

Action: Show a close-up of a female human "mad scientist" who is crouched over her test subject -- an exposed brain. (It should be pretty bloodless -- maybe we only see brain matter through a square in a sheet, or maybe the subject's opened head is angled away from us.) She looks like she's about to go taking samples from this brain -- maybe she has a small bowl in one hand and some sort of drill-like scooping tool in the other. She leans in with slightly twitchy glee, eager to take her first scoop.

Focus: The mad scientist

Mood: "This is for SCIENCE!"

Reading the art order and looking at the world guide reference, it seemed pretty obvious to me what the fine folks at Wizards were looking for, and so I went at it. Here's what the sketch ended up looking like:

©Wizards of the Coast

Balancing the needs of the piece was a little tough when pulling this together. I really wanted to show the patient's face and the description clearly was steering me away from that urge. I tried to find a compromise everyone would be happy with. When I got my feedback, the need for bloodlessness in the piece was reiterated and a request was made that lengthen the fabric covering the patient's face to just below the tip of the nose. Simple enough, and still allowing for some degree of showing the patient in some way. After agreeing to the changes, I went to paint.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished piece is the usual oil on hardboard and measures fourteens inches wide by eleven inches tall.

While there are the usual tweaks I'd make to this piece and things I'd like to fix, I'm pretty happy with the final painting overall. If nothing else, it was a really nice reintroduction to the insanity of Innistrad and a fun chance to touch on parts of the world that I didn't get an opportunity to depict during the last go around. Honestly, for me there's nothing quite like getting to paint a manic lobotomist enjoying herself while plying her trade — even if it does make for another in a long line of creepy images I've created for Magic: the Gathering. This would only be the first from this new Magic set to to add to that pile of work, however...

Sheer

Here's a random image from a while ago. Not sure how it got past me, but I stumbled upon the painting in my flat files the other day realized I never posted about it.

No real story behind it, really. Like other pieces before it, I took a some gessoed hardboard and started making marks in oil. No sketch, no real goal, just slapped down, random oil marks. Then I started wiping into those marks with a brush and thinner or a rubber blending tool. Then I'd push back with more paint, then back to wiping, etc. Once I started to see something develop, I worked into it to clarify the image until I could start to see a finish in my head. At that point, I finally began working toward the finish.

The nice thing about working this way is that it's immediate, forgiving, and very low stakes. The absolute worst case scenario is that I end up with a half-baked image that can be scraped away or a surface that now has a ton of random marks on it that I can work on top of. Neither of these scenarios particularly bothers me. Plus, because of the small size, we're not talking a lot of wasted materials, either (assuming one would consider exploration of one's medium without usable results a waste—which I actually don't).

©Steven Belledin

The finished painting is five inches wide by seven inches tall and is oil on gessoed hardboard.

A Brief Stop

Later on today, I'll be headed to Vancouver to attend my first Magic tournament in over a year and a half. Before I go, I figured I'd quickly share the painting I did for one of the exclusive playmats available at the event.

The assignment for the playmat was simply to make an image with some sort of ties to the Vancouver area that still felt like it belonged to the greater world of Magic: the Gathering. So I painted this:

©Steven Belledin

Essentially, I depicted a couple of local mountain peaks known as the Lions in the background and included Vancouver's official city bird of 2015, the chickadee, as well as Vancouver's official city bird of 2016, the peregrine falcon. Obviously I played with scale a bit, but it is meant to be a fantasy painting after all.

The finished piece is twenty inches wide by fourteen inches tall and is oil on gessoed hardboard. Those attending the Grand Prix in Vancouver will have an opportunity to check it out in person if they're interested.

Gladehart Cavalry

In great contrast to Goblin Dark-Dwellers, Gladehart Cavalry was a bit less straightforward, though the art description wasn't weird or complicated or anything. I simply was asked to paint three axe-wielding elf warriors mounted on the backs of antelope-like creatures called gladeharts. The blades of the axes, as well as the eyes of both the elves and gladeharts needed to glow green. The piece was to have a majestic, parade-like atmosphere and feature some elven architecture in the background. None of this should have been an issue, really. The designs for elf costume, elf architecture, the axes and even the gladeharts were provided. What could possibly go wrong?

I read and reread the description, looked over my reference, doodled a bunch of things and finally arrived at this sketch:

©Wizards of the Coast

While not my best sketch, it is hardly my worst, but immediately after handing it in there was a problem. This was the point at which I learned the image I was working on was alternate art and that Dan Scott had already depicted this crew. The fine folks at Wizards were kind enough to supply Dan's image for clarification and it became obvious to me why there was a degree of concern. Unfortunately, we'd made a lot of similar decisions and there was a concern that our images were too alike. So how did this happen? Well, there are a couple reasons and one of the biggest contributing factors was my fault.

If you go back through the blog, you'll find that in some of the previous instances where I've made alternate art for Magic, I've been a bit disappointed when I've furnished with an image of the original piece. It can, on some level, be very limiting. And, given the level of talent Wizards has at its disposal, it can also be quite intimidating. My preference would be to not get a copy of that original image, and this is something I'm confident I've expressed in front of one or more of Magic's Art Directors. I suspect that the Art Director I was working with in this case was deferring to my preferences (which was very kind of her, but in all honesty she needn't have listened to the my silly ideals), and the result was a certain degree of parallel creation—or rather, two people coming up with roughly the same thing simultaneously.

That that occurred in this instance is not very surprising. We have three riders on animals with horns that are best depicted frontally. Were you to change perspective even by forty-five degrees, the spacing of the horns starts to present problems in composing an image where all three riders, their mounts and their weapons remain clear and visible when reduced. It's not impossible, mind you, but it wasn't where either Dan's or my gut instincts took either of us.

Now, are the images alike? Yes. We made the same choices in the make-up of the party and even how they're dressed. Were there still differences? Plenty. Was it impossible to further differentiate the two images? Not at all. And that is all the Art Director ever asked of me. She was concerned (rightly) about the similarities of the pieces, but rather than make me go back to the drawing board (which was entirely her right had she wished it), she trusted me to push my piece in a different direction from Dan's using a palette of violets, oranges and greens. Truly I was spoiled by the level of trust.

Beyond that, we agreed that keeping some of the crowd in the piece was valuable, but altering the upper tier of onlookers (that's what those scribbles in the background of the sketch are) might not be a bad idea for clarity's sake. With that, I was approved to go to paint.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished painting is oil on hardboard and measures fourteen inches wide by eleven inches tall.

There are aspects of this piece that I think worked out okay, and others that I feel could have been better. The biggest issue is that I continue to wonder if eliminating the top tier of elf onlookers was a bad idea or not. While I like the contrast of the cooler violet color behind the central figure, I wonder if the composition wasn't a bit stronger with that horizontal shape spanning the piece as in the sketch.

As repeat visitors can attest, I doubt myself quite fairly often when it comes to my work and I'm never entirely sure how useful such doubts really are. The painting is done and handed in, after all. On the other hand, I suppose that such feelings are a positive sign that I still care a good deal about making the best images that I can and trying my very best to never let a client down (not to mention let myself down). So I guess I've got that going for me...which is nice.

The obvious remaining question is whether or not I've changed my mind about seeing the original versions of art when called upon to do an alternate take. I think I'd still rather get a chance to create with a clean mental slate, but I recognize that it's not always practical or even practicable. In the end, I just have to trust my Art Directors to make the call.

Tyrant of Valakut

For someone who had no real drive to paint dragons, the last couple years have forced me to get into them in a fairly large way. Lots of drawings, a few paintings, tons of discussion and analysis (not to mention many a headache) was the result. But if I ever thought that my time worrying about dragons was done at the end of the Tarkir block of Magic, boy was I wrong. In terms of preliminary drawings, color studies, the number of images pulled from the internet for reference and total man hours, this piece represents quite an investment in still more dragons. Or rather one dragon. The Tyrant of Valakut (Intro Pack Version).

Here's the art order Wizards gave me:

ART DESCRIPTION:
INTRO PACK
Setting: ZENDIKAR
Color: Red creatureLocation: top of a cliff (use pp. 43-46 in the World Guide as a starting point, but make it your own)Action: Show us an immense dragon perched on a rocky cliff. See the dragon on p. 163, but remove the back protrusions. This dragon is thicker with several sets of tusks that protrude from its lower jaw. Its wings are unfurled, as it stands triumphantly over a medium sized dead Emrakul-lineage Eldrazi spawn (see pp. 228-230).
Focus: the dragon
Mood: Raw power. The uncontested master.

After soaking in the information from the description for a bit, I started doodling in my sketchbook in an attempt to grope my way toward a solution of some sort. Having to revise the design of the dragon a bit was an interesting challenge and I tried to remain fairly true to the spirit of the original while making the necessary changes and adding my own flavor to it. Here's where I started to figure stuff out:

Once I got to this point, I move to Photoshop for the sketch.

©Wizards of the Coast

The Art Director seemed to like it and gave me the go ahead. Before going to paint, however, I went ahead and did a color study.

As you can see, elements of the background began to change a bit. I found that as I filled in those large shapes with color, they began to feel uniform and a bit boring. In the end, I felt that breaking those shapes up really added a degree of interest to the piece. Still, I wasn't totally happy with it and showed it to a group of compatriots. They gave me some input and I tweaked it a bit.

A bit more broken up and a greater variety of direction in the floating mountains in the background. I was getting closer. I showed the revised version to my friends again and they had a few more thoughts. more changes were made and I settled on this:

I knew that things would likely change a bit more over the course of painting the piece, but I felt like I was in pretty good shape nevertheless. So, I transferred my drawing to the surface and went to town.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished painting is oil on gessoed hardboard and measures twenty-four inches wide by eighteen inches tall.

As you can see, the piece became darker in the paint. This is largely due to my love of a heavier palette and the fact that I felt that the background was a little too washed out in the sketch. As I developed the painting, the darker background called for a darker dragon, as well. The added bonus of this was that it became easier to sell the molten crags in the dragon's skin. The downside is that piece isn't quite as luminous as it was in the sketch, and the overall lighting scheme shifted quite a bit. Such is life.

Painting this large for Magic is a tough thing. Inherently, a lot of detail is lost and the printed image fails to do the painting justice. However, as long as the piece reads okay at card size, that tends to not be too big a deal—at least for the purposes of the client, that is. For my purposes, I was just hoping to make a cool painting that had a degree of presence in person. I think I accomplished that. Still, I think it's apparent that this piece might fall outside ideal size for my Magic work. I'm beginning to feel that outside of landscapes, 18x14 is about as big as I can go without losing too much. That's not to say that I won't ever go this large ever again. In fact, it's likely I will should the right piece come along. Whatever the case, this felt like a worthy opportunity to go a bit bigger and it's an experiment that I'm rather happy with.

Goblin Dark-Dwellers

I use the word "straightforward" a lot when describing the process of illustrating for Magic: the Gathering. One could argue that I overuse the word, and I guess one might be right. The truth is that to a greater or lesser extent, the job becomes a bit routine. The assignment comes in, I put a sketch together, I hand the sketch in. If there are any changes necessary, I make them and resubmit the sketch. Otherwise, if I've gained approval, I spend a day or so to prepare the surface of the board or transfer the drawing (or both). Then I paint the piece, digitize and retouch it. Finally, I submit the digital file to Wizards. On average, within a week after the completion of an assignment, the process begins all over again.

Based on the history of this blog, one would be correct in saying that I often struggle with pieces. However, that's not always the case. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to get assignments that just fit into the pattern and schedule, and don't ever cause me a whole lot of grief. Such images come together easily enough for me to not feel guilty about enjoying my life at night and on weekends instead of toiling away on a piece. You know, sometimes a piece is just... straightforward. This was one of those times. As always, we begin with an art description:

ART DESCRIPTION:

Setting: ZENDIKAR

Color: Red creatureLocation: underground cavern

Action: In this shot, we are looking up at three Dark Dweller goblins (see p. 109) crawling head first down a semi-cylindrical vertical cave shaft toward us. The goblins are sightless. The shaft is crisscrossed by a network of climbing ropes installed by unseen human adventurers. The shaft is lit from below by off-camera torches. We should get the feeling that these goblins are stalking someone.

Focus: the goblins

After getting my assignment, the first step in my process is always to start doing exploratory thumbnail drawings. While many of my fellow illustrators make beautifully composed drawings contained in perfectly drawn boxes, my thumbnails are a scribbled mess and rarely start in any kind of frame. The struggle for me is always to get poses and mood down first. Only after figuring out a direction for those things do I begin to compose the piece as a whole. In this case, I quickly found that I had a great deal of difficulty with the part of the description about the "semi-cylindrical vertical cave shaft." I don't know why, but I couldn't find a compelling way to sell that part of the image while keeping a satisfying hierarchy of the goblins receding into the distance. Without a doubt, there are artists who could have easily nailed this off the bat (and Karl Kopinski subsequently did a much better job of it in his version of the art), but it was a weird obstacle that became something I got hung up on.

The thing is, one can't dwell for too long on details like that as the deadline is ever marching closer, so I set that issue aside and decided to first attempt to make a piece that I found satisfying and then see if I could make that cylindrical tunnel thing work. The short version is that I decided on a piece that I liked and never got the cave's shaft to feel particularly cylindrical. Still, I thought the sketch was strong enough to submit and hoped that the fine folks at Wizards really meant it when they wrote in the description that the focus was the goblins themselves, rather than the environment they were crawling through.

©Wizards of the Coast

As stated in the description, the design for these guys was already set, so I was basically finding a way to make them work in a new context. While I think Wizards was probably thinking about more of a Gollum vibe, I kind of was thinking more of an "Alien" vibe. In the end, I think it came out somewhere in the middle.

Anyway, they dug the sketch as is and I got approval. But rather than go to paint right away, I did something I rarely do: a quick digital color study.

©Wizards of the Coast

Satisfied with where I was headed, I prepared my painting surface and went to town.

©Wizards of the Coast

The final painting is the usual oil on hardboard and measures sixteen inches wide by twelve inches tall.

In the end, I don't have a lot to say about this piece other than that I'm satisfied with how it turned out. It wasn't particularly complicated in subject, concept, or delivery, and it was a pretty quick turnaround due in no small part to the simplicity of the color palette and the size of the shapes involved. Truthfully, if I could change anything, it would be that the walls would be covered with goblins, but the assignment was to paint only three. While it would seem like Wizards would be happy to get more for the money, that's not always the case. This is a game that I'm illustrating after all, and there's a high probability that any specific numbers mentioned in an art description are tied to a game mechanic in some way — not always, but often enough to have been an issue. So, as in this case, I often go the conservative route and deliver what they ask for. Beyond there not being swarms of goblins, however, I'm pretty content with how it came out.

So that's it. Another piece down. And here it is in its card frame: