Revisiting Reprints: Duress

While I've already covered how Duress came to be in a post about reference (link), I figured I'd chat a bit about an aspect of the piece I really haven't spoken about before. But before I do, I figured I'd re-post some images and add something that isn't present in that previous post: an alternate sketch.

Here's the sketch for the piece as it was approved:

©Wizards of the Coast

In addition to the above sketch, however, I was asked to explore another option, just in case. While not revelatory, it does offer some insight into the process. I think.

©Wizards of the Coast

Sure it's a bit Lost smoke monster, but it was definitely worth taking a gander at as there was no telling at the time whether a veiny cage would work. I think it's rather fortunate for everyone involved that it did. Still, it's always worth trying different stuff. It'll either reinforce your decisions or poke holes in them. Both results (believe it or not) are good ones.

The result of the extra exploration was a piece that Wizards first printed in the Magic 2010 core set, then reprinted in the Magic 2011 core set, the Duel Decks: Divine vs. Demonic set, the Premium Deck Series: Graveborn set, and now the Magic 2013 core set. This image has really gotten around.

©Wizards of the Coast

Now, a fun fact about the piece is that I was given the choice as to whether or not the elf was a male or female. Obviously I chose female — ahem — it is obvious...right? I made that decision for two reasons. First, I was tired of painting guys. Second, in my mind, women were under-represented in the game, and given the opportunity to adjust the numbers somewhat, I thought it worth doing so.

To a certain extent, a result of this decision is that I strayed into the damsel in distress territory, which is an area I usually actively avoid. Thing is, in my mind this isn't an elf that is waiting to be rescued. In fact, there's no reason to believe she even will be. She is forever stuck in time under...well, duress. Still, like I said, I typically prefer not to depict female characters as victims if at all possible, so it's strange that I ended up doing just that. Add to this oddity that the image is a popular one (especially among men), and I have to admit that I've questioned my choice. Is it the image they're responding to? The fact that it's a female elf? Or is it the popularity of the card itself that drives the interest?

Either way, I must confess that there's a part of me that if given the chance to do it all over would paint another dude. It would be interesting to know whether it would retain its popularity.

Crimson Muckwader

Crimson Muckwader is a rarity. It's a piece painted in front of other artists, which means there was daily, live feedback as it came to be. As I mentioned yesterday, this job came in the midst of a great deal of upheaval. Much of the uncertainty was dealt with while working on Tricks of the Trade, and after that piece had been finished I was whisked away to an artist retreat.

I'd planned to attend the retreat much earlier in the year when things had looked to be running smoothly. I'd also planned to work on a personal piece while there. By late summer, however, it became clear that bad things were afoot with Amy's job, and I felt it prudent to take on more work than I'd original intended to so as to pad our pockets (just in case) and scuttled plans for a personal piece. Thus, I ended up working on Crimson Muckwader instead of the canvas which I only recently (and finally) began.

Truth be told, I had mixed feelings about going to the retreat at all. Things were tight and spending the money didn't seem like a wise move. Amy encouraged me to go, however, and I compromised by eating in instead of out. In retrospect, I was a fool to even consider canceling.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning, shall we? Let's take a look at the art order for what was then called "Marsh Skink":

ART DESCRIPTION:
Color: Red creature
Location: A swamp
Action: Show a poisonous lizard emerging from the dark water of the swamp. Its bold, poison-dart-frog-like coloration (please keep red as a color on him) is in sharp contrast to its murky surroundings. The lizard is about six feet long and resembles a fanged skink.
Focus: The marsh lizard
Mood: There's no doubt it's dangerous.

Right away I'm going to confess a problem I have: I can be a bit literal. I want to reiterate that this thing was originally titled "Marsh Skink." What that meant to me was that I needed to start by looking up various species of skinks and extrapolate from there. To my mind, they obviously wanted a skink because they'd bothered to call it one. Clearly I'd forgotten on some level that this was Magic, and clearly I'd completely ignored the fact that skinks are pretty tame looking creatures and not very threatening, because I started with this:

©Wizards of the Coast

While this sketch does solve several aspects of the art order, the skink in question falls well short of anything that could be confused with "dangerous." Well, that's not entirely true, as many things that turn out to be dangerous look pretty innocuous, but that's rarely — if ever — called for in Magic. Wizards tends to want things to be a bit more flamboyant. Fortunately, I understood that on some level, because I went ahead and handed this second version in for insurance:

©Wizards of the Coast

If you're sitting there failing to see how that's much of an improvement, it should be no surprise to you that I was asked to revisit the piece, this time ignoring the idea of it being a skink at all. Evil lizard was what was called for, and so went back to work and gave them this:

©Wizards of the Coast

Finally, I managed a sketch that seemed to meet their criteria in a satisfactory way and I got approval. So, I went about creating a cruddy, clay maquette, shot it, and compiled a bunch of photo reference from the internet.

Sculpey on a piece of bright blue plexiglass.

Next, I printed the sketch out, mounted it on hardboard, and slapped a very simple acrylic base down, painting the lizard pure Cadmium Red Medium and everything else Terra Verte. That was the painting's condition when I finally set everything up in a barn in Western Massachusetts alongside the following artists:

Boris Vallejo
Julie Bell
Dave Palumbo
Anthony Palumbo
Greg Manchess
Lars Grant-West
Dave Seeley
Winona Nelson
Dan Dos Santos
Scott Brundage
Randy Gallegos
Sam Burley
Chris Moeller
and Arkady Roytman

God I hope I didn't forget anybody.

Anyway, there I was with a tiny Magic painting while most folks were cranking away at much more substantial work. The fact was, though, that I needed to get the piece done as there was a deadline afoot, so I set to work. Given that there were so many artists in the room, it was inevitable that I soon began getting a comment here, a suggestion there. Unfortunately, I go so much input and this took place long enough ago that I honestly couldn't say who said what, but I remember that most (if not all) of the shared thoughts were helpful. Still, despite the weird start to the job, I was pretty confident that I knew what I was doing, and much of the input ended up being pretty nit-picky, which was all I could ask for, really.

Here's how it came out.

©Wizards of the Coast

It's 12"x9" and is the usual oil on hardboard.

Of various bits of input made by my fellow artists over the week in Massachusetts, the most notable were the suggestion that a bit of the elbow from the opposite arm be visible just to the right of the neck, as well as the suggestion of the shadow that falls across the tail. Really simple stuff, but that kind of thing adds quite a bit to the piece — at least in my mind.

Aside from getting a piece done, I managed to gain a certain level of confidence in my process. Many artists I know feel self-conscious about their process in some way. I don't know if it's the isolation from other artists or the prolonged feeling that they're somehow getting away with something, but I know a lot of illustrators who are are clearly uncomfortable with how they go about putting a painting together. The best cure for that kind of thing (at least for me) is to go out and spend a few days painting with a few other folks. Sure, I can't even come close to doing what Greg Manchess or Boris or Chris Moeller do, but despite the vast chasm between their work and my own, there are threads of commonality. They put their paint down one brushstroke at a time, just as I do.

And, as much as I preach to others that each of us should do whatever it takes to accomplish the final image, sometimes I forget to take my own advice. Looking at the differences within the various processes, it's clear that each person has resolved this concept in their own way. Seeing and understanding that kind of thing can be invaluable to someone who is struggling, and I must confess that coming away from the retreat with the knowledge that I was not a painting troglodyte helped buttress me mentally for the months of uncertainty that lay ahead.

In total, I think it took me about four days of solid work with an hour or two of fussing to put this piece to rest. All the while, while toiling away, I sat pondering what I should do for a personal piece. I had a bit of time before IlluxCon and I still wanted to have something new. In my second to last day at the retreat, inspiration finally came and I knocked out a couple sketches. These little nuggets ended up becoming The Weight of Midworld, which I managed to complete (or so I thought), just in time for the trip out to Altoona, Pennsylvania. So, I guess in the end I managed to get some personal work done at the retreat after all.

Tricks of the Trade

Despite what that title might indicate, this is not a post in which I reveal to you bits and bobs that can make your work look more (or less) professional. Okay, it sort of is, but that's not why it's called "Tricks of the Trade." No, this is all about new Magic art, which appears on a card whose title happens to be "Tricks of the Trade." But don't let that stop you from reading on, because there are actual secrets revealed herein. Dark, horrible secrets, from a life filled with shame and regret...

Let's start with the description, shall we?

ART DESCRIPTION:
Color: Blue Spell
Location: A dimly lit temple or shrine
Action: The spell shows the use of magic by an amazing merfolk thief. Show a rogue hanging upside down as she slides down a rope into a dimly lit temple or shrine. She’s about to steal something, and she’s using powerful stealth magic. Her merfolk skin shimmers with waves of subtle blue-green light. Maybe she’s using just her feet to slide down the rope, which is an incredible feat of athleticism. She’s young, attractive, and dressed in the dark-colored clothes of a thief. Maybe we see the object that she is planning to steal, but it’s not necessary.
Focus: The scene
Mood: Who needs picklocks when you’ve got spells?

This piece is from the new Magic 2013 core set. Unlike the expansion sets which have fancy names and come with style guides, the core sets tend to be visually less specific in their location, and tend to allow the artists to do their own concepting for a change. In other words, we get to play around a bit more and stretch our legs.

While I'd like to say that I got to do all those things and come up with some insane stuff on this piece, I can't really. You see, with the description above, I got a bunch of examples of what the merfolk should look like. While not a formal style sheet, the sample images effectively served the same purpose. I knew what the merfolk were meant to look like, and I knew vaguely what their clothing should entail. Now, I'm not mentioning this in an attempt to file a complaint, but I'm also not going to deny being a little disappointed that I was following someone else's designs on an annual set that has traditionally been more open-ended. It would have been nice to just do my own thing. Disappointment or no, it was the assignment I was given and there were still problems that needed solving. I could complain or I could try and do my best with it. I chose the latter.

So, I took the description and attached images and I immediately started to finagle a solution. The first hurdle was figuring out a pose that solved the problem. My big worry when posing things typically is the reduced size of the reproduction. It's always a potential issue that the figures won't read correctly in card form. In this case, I had a merfolk suspended from a rope by their legs. Not necessarily an easy task. I drew a bunch of different things and finally settled on a pose. I quickly realized, however, that with the pose and the rope it was going to be difficult to fit into the composition in large enough form to read properly. Honestly, the piece felt like it should be a vertically oriented, but I somehow had to fit it into the horizontal space allotted. The only way I could get it to work was by rotating the camera and viewing the thief from below, forcing her into a pretty severe perspective.  I drew it up formally, and handed in the following sketch:

©Wizards of the Coast

Despite it's rather lackluster quality, this sketch was approved, so I shot reference and went to paint.

Wait. Let me back up a second. I just glossed over something that I think is worth talking about: shooting reference. While I've talked at great length about the generalities of shooting reference, I think it's worth talking about this bit of reference specifically. While I'm not going to show you the pictures, I can tell you that the reference for this piece required Amy and I to take turns posing and photographing one another. We posed by balancing on our stomachs atop an old steamer trunk, arching our backs and attempting to mimic the position seen above. It was pretty taxing physically, but I got what I needed, and I'm not going to deny being sore the next morning.

Unlike a lot of folks, I tend not to Frankenstein a bunch of shots together to create a master reference image. Instead, I select two or three that come the closest to the desired result and bounce between them. This process is just a different means to the same end, but I find that my mind is a bit more engaged while I'm working. Having worked both ways, I honestly can't advocate one method over another, I think it's always best to figure out what works for you and go with that.

So, yeah, the painting.

Given how much of the aesthetic was already determined, I decided to spend some time on the architecture. Seemed to me that it was the one place that I could add something significant to the piece, and it was a subject that was still sorely lacking from my work in general. Even if this didn't end up being a portfolio piece, it was at least practice.

The magic described in the art order was pretty vague, but the obvious solution in my mind was for the magic to look almost like water reflections. Not sure why it was obvious, but it's what my gut told me to do. My only concern was that these magic reflections wouldn't stand out properly. My solution was to give the piece a very warm palette, while keeping the magic glistening very cool and slightly out of place.

At least that's what I intended. Then life got in the way.

©Wizards of the Coast

This is what the painting looks like. It's 12"x9", is the usual oil on hardboard, and for whatever reason I didn't incorporate the magic glow into the piece from the beginning. This lapse was a mistake to be sure because it caused a headache and resulted a finish that looks quite different from the published version.

While it's not a very good excuse, I can tell you that this piece was done right as Amy lost her job in Massachusetts and the daunting conversations surrounding her career's future and our potential relocation began while I was painting this very piece. Obviously there's a lot to be concerned about when big things like this hit you, and as I'm a pretty nervous guy by nature, my worry levels increased ten fold when Amy's job went kaput. Unfortunately, a lot of my fears and self-doubt wound up in this piece. I remember feeling pretty confident about things after the sketch was approved, but I can tell you that I lost much of that confidence as the image progressed. I lost faith that I could pull it off, and I resolved midway through to polish it off digitally.

In retrospect, this decision was pretty curious given that my digital skills are pretty weak. If there's anything I should have had little to no faith about, it should have been my ability to do a decent job painting the magic in Photoshop. For some reason, however, it seemed like a really good idea. Since I'd lost faith in my ability to pull it off in paint, at least I would be switching to a medium that allowed for pushing and pulling to my heart's content. I could do something and undo it just as easily.
Given how the timing was working out, with the deadline looming, I had left myself no other options. Not if I wanted to turn the job in on time, anyway. So I plugged in my Wacom tablet and went to work.

This is the result:

©Wizards of the Coast

I've got mixed feelings about this hybrid piece. I like both versions, but I'm not sure I like the version with the magic more. I guess that's why I've left the painting be in its original form. I'm not sure if that's a mistake or not. Either way, I was too quickly on to the next job to go back into it, and I've honestly not thought a whole lot about it since.

In many ways the fact that I pulled it off and handed it in on time was a miracle. There were a lot of sleepless nights and hard conversations happening at the time, and I was pretty distracted. Eventually, Amy moved into my studio with me and did much of her job searching from just a few feet away. We got to spend four months hanging out together while figuring out our next move, and believe it or not it ended up being more fun than stressful. Initially, though, I was just a ball of nerves and this painting will likely always remind me of that. All things considered, it could have come out WAY worse.

Closing the Door On Innistrad, Part 4...ish

Writing about the building of Innistrad is a difficult task. First off, it took place a couple years ago, and my memory has never really been particularly good to begin with and the passage of time really hasn't helped, so I'm finding that there's a lot of sifting necessary to find nuggets worth mentioning. Second, there are aspects of the task that just aren't interesting to write about. There's a real danger of the whole thing devolving into a list in paragraph form of everything I was responsible form — I drew this building, and then I drew this tree, and then I drew this monster, and so forth. That type of thing isn't really interesting to read or write, and so there's a lot of summing up that was done to make it less mind-numbing. While resulting in a tighter narrative, my editing efforts resulted in the omission of some interesting anecdotes due to the fact that they either brought the tale to a screeching halt, or required rather elaborate and eye-rolling segues. Still, I wanted to share some of these things because I thought they added a certain something to the mix. So, despite attempting to avoid a list-like post, I now bring you an actual list.

• The hellhound concept drawings were the very first time I've ever colored something digitally. Sure, to that point I'd done a bunch of digital value studies, but nothing in color. The result of my efforts is quick, dirty and not very polished, but I think it got the point across. I guess the fine folks at Wizards agreed as they didn't ask Daarken to redo it.

• By far my favorite image created during the three weeks came out of an exploration Steve Prescott was doing of treants. For those who just scratched their head and raised an eyebrow, a treant is basically just an ent. You know, those tree guys from Lord of the Rings? Those things. Steve took on the task of trying to create a unique look for them in Innistrad, and came up with a fairly wide variety. The race as a whole was later dropped, but not before Steve did a priceless image which consisted of an upright log that had a pair of sexy, female human legs complete fishnets and high heels sticking out the bottom of it. Obviously it loses something in my description, but it tickled my funnybone and I really hope Steve chooses to share the image on his sketch blog sometime.

• As I believe I've mentioned before, I often watch movies while I work, and my three weeks during the concept push were no exception. The obvious difference being that I wasn't the only member of the audience. Whenever consensus dictated, I'd pop a DVD into the computer and we'd watch something that was in some way pertinent (or not), to the task at hand. Some of the films we watched included but were not limited to: Brotherhood of the Wolf, Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Last of the Mohicans (which Steve managed to tarnish for me by pointing out a cloth rock that ripples as Daniel Day Lewis runs past it during the climactic foot chase). While watching these movies, we'd close the door to the room so as to keep from disturbing the rest of the office, and the lack of air circulation that resulted caused the room to heat up to somewhere in the area of a thousand degrees. The sweat was worth the entertainment, though.

• Matt Cavotta was, in fact, the fourth member of the concepting team, though he was trying to do his part remotely from Ohio. Due to his separation, he was completely cut off from the rest of us, and periodically would send sketches in blindly. I attempted several times to get images of our work out to him via email and text message, but none of them ever went through, so I'm sure he felt like he was spinning his wheels. But I think he had other things on his mind, anyway. While working on the world, he was also going through the application and interview process for the staff job he now holds at Wizards. I'm guessing he was more than a little overwhelmed at the time. I know I'd have been.

• One day, Mark Purvis popped his head in to say hello. Mark is a brand manager for Magic and for some reason began talking about Japan as though we'd all been to tournaments there. I believe at the time, only Daarken had, and Steve and I were more than happy to let him know that we hadn't yet been and were absolutely interested. I'm not sure if a direct line can be traced to this chance meeting, our conversation, and my eventual trip to Nagoya (where I'd again meet Mark), but it can't all be a coincidence...can it?

• I consumed a lot of caffeine while working at Wizards. Almost without fail, there was either coffee, tea, or Coke sitting on my desk. I'm not sure why I found it so necessary to keep my caffeine levels so high (maybe it had something to do with the warm room and the late nights painting the Badass: Birth of a Legend cover in my hotel room), but I'd have gotten next to nothing done if it weren't for the constant pick-me-up. Next to the ubiquitous caffeinated beverage was an apple which I took from the front desk of our hotel each morning. These apples were complimentary and I generally took one to supplement the days when my lunch was self-catered (and thus lackluster). The upside, however, was that no matter who provided the lunch, I could always look forward to the free cookies which replaced the apples each evening at the hotel's front desk. Steve, Daarken, and I greedily gorged on these cookies with a great deal of satisfaction after a long day's work, and in preparation of the work that each of us had ahead of us in our respective hotel rooms each night.

Closing the Door On Innistrad, Part 3

Hopefully you've noticed that this is part 3. It's sort of the end. The beginning can be found here. The middle can be found here. If you haven't already done so, go back and read those other bits so this bit makes more sense (assuming it makes any sense to begin with).

Anyway...

Truth be told, Steve Prescott had done a great deal of ground work for the human costuming. He'd also done a good job of building on the designs of the vampires and their corner of the world. While Mike Lim and I attempted to add to this stuff a bit, it became fairly obvious early on that we weren't going to be contributing much, as Steve had pretty much nailed it. So, we spent our time asking ourselves what priests or mages would wear and then trying to come up with corresponding drawings to answer those questions.

From there, Steve and Mike spent some time designing the werewolves. This I avoided like the plague, and it turned out that I could afford to as they'd managed to find a direction that I thought really worked, and the Wizards team agreed. Relieved that I could avoid that subject, I moved on. I had a hankering to start working on some landscapes and architecture.

©Wizards of the Coast

*Record scratch*

Architecture? Seriously? Steve Belledin working on buildings? That's like Superman brushing his teeth with Kryptonite toothpaste for the fun of it! Seriously? Yup. Can't say why, but it was the one thing I was sure about design-wise and I set out to pin it down as much as possible. Plus, at the time, no one else seemed interested in taking it on. My inspiration was largely Prussian and Germanic architecture, with a gothic churchy vibe mixed in. It's fairly well trodden ground, but I knew I could provide a decent baseline for future illustrators to build on, and my fellow concept artists didn't seem to argue. These drawings took an inordinate amount of time — especially due to my refusal to use a ruler for much of them — but I'm pretty happy with them on the whole.

The landscapes were based off of strange memories of Universal monster movies, and parts of England and New Zealand I've seen. Both Steve and Mike added to this pile of imagery and we slowly started to get a real feel for what the world looked like — what it felt like. It's weird, but I feel that if a concepting team has done its job, you can easily imagine what a given place smells like. That's what I was striving for. I wanted people to smell the wood burning in fire places, the wet pine needles decaying on the ground, the odor of the damp grass as it's trodden upon. It's an element of the game, and indeed the world, that will never come completely across, but I was certainly thinking about it while I worked on the thing.

©Wizards of the Coast

When concepting in-house at Wizards, there's a process involved. As drawings are finished, they are affixed to a long, magnetic dry-erase board that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-25 feet long. This is done using magnets that are one of the five colors of the Magic color pie, so that foresty stuff gets a green magnet, demony stuff gets a red magnet, and so forth. Over time, the board is divided into five sections. Everyday, we'd spend about fifteen minutes going over the progress and deciding what made the cut, what didn't, and what needed to be revised. Surprisingly, very little was ever changed, and though there was a small reject pile, most of what we did stayed on the board and eventually made it into the styleguide.

©Wizards of the Coast

The free form nature of the three weeks is still surprising to me. We had no set things we were each responsible for. There was a list of needs that we strove to fulfill, but we were free to shift gears at any time and move on to something completely different should we grow tired of a given subject. As a result, we were never bored, and the list of needs for the set got shorter and shorter. We didn't even strictly stick to a given medium. Daarken did some pencil drawings (some of which have been confused with mine) and a bunch of digital concepts and paintings. I worked mostly in pencil, but did a watercolor painting then switched to digital when I worked on the geists and spirits. Prescott, on the other hand, stuck to pencil, and the mileage he put on that thing was phenomenal.

Admittedly, I am not the world's fastest drawer. Mike is pretty quick with his stylus and easily put me to shame as he was able to do a full-color image in the amount of time it took me to do a solid pencil drawing. Steve, on the other hand, would crank out page after page after page of concepts — often with two or three fully rendered drawings per page. I think at his peak he put out three pages to my one and I'm still amazed two years later.

©Wizards of the Coast

 
Despite what felt like my lagging productivity, the three of us ended up covering the dry-erase board. We were told that our efforts had produced the most usable concepts from a single concept push in Magic history. Well, at least to that point. But we weren't satisfied. We continued until we'd covered much of the wall, as well.

While three weeks seems like a long time, I assure you that it is not. The time flew by and before I knew it, I was checking out of the hotel and on my way to the airport. Steve left the next day, but Mike had signed on for four weeks, so he was left to do some clean up work and refinement. Before long, he was gone too, and Richard began to fill in gaps. If he didn't do the work himself, he farmed the work out to other folks like Wayne Reynolds or Vincent Proce. Additional folks who had their fingers in the punch bowl include Matt Cavotta, Adam Paquette, James Paick, and Jung Ho Park.

Eventually, the work got compiled into the styleguide, the styleguide got sent to all the Magic artists working on the world, and their efforts, in turn, resulted in the Innistrad, Dark Ascension, and Avacyn Restored sets of Magic. Six hundred, seventy-four pieces of art, not including that which was produced for promotional cards, packaging and advertisements were created (link). I'm sure that if those other things were counted, you'd easily end up with a clean seven-hundred or so. It's daunting to think about what goes into a set on the front end, and what that translates to when it's all said and done. Either way, I'm tickled to know that my efforts helped Innistrad come to be.

©Wizards of the Coast

I'm not sure if I'll ever get another crack at helping to create a new Magic plane, but I'm grateful to have gotten the opportunity for this one. The three weeks I spent working with those other guys were among the most fun I've had in my career. It was quite reminiscent of my years at Pratt Institute, bouncing ideas off of other artists, swapping input, and watching movies together (both bad and good), while getting our work done. It made me wish that I could afford to share a studio with other artists every day in hopes to keep some of that going. But another part of me is content with the fact that only sounds in my studio right now are the humming of the ceiling fan and the clicking of the keys under my fingers as I write this.

Despite the fact that the fun of the concept push was over, the fun that the set would provide would continue. After all, I got to work and play in that world for the next year. And so did everyone else. I have been utterly amazed to see where all the other artists took our raw designs and ideas. It has been awe-inspiring to say the least. Unfortunately, however, with the release of the last set, Avacyn Restored, even that fun has come to an end, and I have to say that I'm sad to see Innistrad go. The entire year was a blast. Still, there's much to look forward to. Before long, a new styleguide will arrive at my door, and with it will come the excitement and joy of unwrapping a whole new world and getting to play in its recesses for a while. Man, it's going to be sweet! But that's not all.

The biggest side-effect of this experience has been that I've discovered the bliss of building new worlds just for myself.

©Adam Lee

From left to right: Richard Whitters, Mike "Daarken" Lim, Steve Prescott, and some other art nerd.

Closing the Door On Innistrad, Part 2

If you haven't caught part one of this tale, it can be found here. If you have read that first part (or at least pretended to read it and looked at the pictures), check out the second part below.

Wizards of the Coast's offices are an odd mix of corporate architecture and gaming wonderland. The fact that there are cubicles throughout belies the head space of those who dwell within. Take a peak into any given workspace and you'll find more gaming and fanboy odds and ends crammed into the various shelves and cabinets than your average booth at a comic convention. A dragon statuette here, some DnD miniatures there, and posters and product pinned to just about every wall imaginable.  It's a little overwhelming aesthetically, as there's just so much to look at, and a man like me can get lost in picking over someone's Happy Meal toy or assorted PEZ dispenser collection.

©Wizards of the Coast

The Magic writing and art team sit clumped together and are arranged adjacent to a couple of empty rooms that I believe were designed to be private offices, but instead one room provides a place for visiting artists to work while the other functions as what might just be the world's most cramped conference room.

I was the second artist to arrive on the scene and while waiting for instructions found Steve Prescott's belongings tossed casually into a cubicle opposite the artist bullpen where I was to make my home. The bullpen consisted of two work stations with a computer and WACOM tablet a piece, two drafting tables, and a shelf containing various art supplies that could just as easily be found in the supply closet of a day camp's arts and crafts center (minus the glitter). I took one station and awaited Daarken's arrival before settling in. I figured I'd give him the opportunity to swap if he wanted to, but it turns out that one station was supplied with a far more modern tablet that was clearly intended for him, leaving me to take the station with the more primeval tablet. I tried to make myself at home and unpacked my sketchbook, pens and pencils.

©Wizards of the Coast

Steve Prescott had been there a full day ahead of me and had jumped into the deep end upon arrival. He filled me in on the wide variety of stuff he'd been working on, which was pretty awesome indeed. We caught up, talked a little about the direction of the set, and began leafing through the many books collected on the shelves for research and inspiration. With a bit more direction in mind, I also took some time to pour through Google Images for anything I could get my hands on that felt right.

Daarken eventually arrived later that day, but he wasn't alone. With him was his very lovely wife, Midori, who I learned would also be sharing our space from time to time. While it might sound like that would make for a cramped work environment, it surprisingly was anything but. In fact, before long, irritated by what I can only assume was separation anxiety, Steve joined us in the bullpen and three became four. The room from that point forward could best be described as cozy and blazingly hot.

©Wizards of the Coast

With all parties present and accounted for, we finally got the official brief with all the writers, art directors, artists, and research and development folks in one room. This is where we learned the following things:

•The world was to have among other things as inspiration, 18th century Prussia.
•The world was almost constantly about 45-50 degrees Fahrenheit.
•The world was to be built entirely around horror tropes.
•These tropes included, but were not limited to: werewolves, vampires, mad scientists, zombies, Frankenstein's monsters, ghosts, devils, and demons.
•There was a religion having something to do with angels (this was still being fleshed out).
•This was the home world of the vampire planeswalker, Sorin Markov.

I remember furiously writing notes down during this meeting. Notes which I don't believe I ever looked at again. I had gotten the gist, which was the important part, and the notes seemed less important as we went along.  Truth be told, I was itching to get to work, but before the work truly began in earnest, Steve, Mike and I spent some time tossing around ideas on where to begin. I mean, how do you start to visually define an entire world? What's the most important thing to nail first?

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As I mentioned, Steve had done this before, and Mike has a great deal of concepting experience, as well. I was the neophyte on the team, so I likely was the only one who was completely clueless. Aside from the list of influences, we knew what Sorin Markov looked like, so we had some real tangible ideas for vampires. Outside of that, we would be making it all up as we went along. Steve suggested that getting the humans and their costuming right was paramount. Figuring out how the people dressed, what their tools and weapons looked like, etc., would help inform the rest of the world and how the humans had shaped it. It would also probably help us develop the zombies, as well as further develop the vampire race.  I appreciated the simple logic in this and Mike seemed to nod in agreement so, with that, all three of us went to work.

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Now, a quick aside. Steve Prescott and I have a certain level of comfort with one another. We tend to joke around, poke fun and say generally horrible things. It's just what we do. Our souls drip with sarcasm and the need to force other people to bathe in said sarcasm. We can't help it, it's in our nature. Daarken, on the other hand, is a very quiet guy. Even in our discussions about direction, his contributions were pretty brief and typically verbally minimalist. It didn't help that he was suffering from an epic cold. Having two idiots bantering back and forth around him probably didn't make him feel any better.

Midori, on the other hand, is pretty outgoing by comparison. She was willing to talk, if only to keep boredom at bay, which I assure you was a task beyond my own abilities, at times. Unfortunately, she was sharing custody with Daarken's cold, and it was clearly playing one parent against the other.

The point is that it took a while for Mr. Lim to warm up to Steve and me. I suspect he didn't quite know what to make of us at first, and who could blame him? There was probably part of him that hoped every morning that Steve and I wouldn't show up, thus leaving him in relative peace. Still, by the end of our three weeks in that little room, he was slinging zingers with the rest of us, and I'm happy to say that I got to know him a bit, as a result.

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Anyway, with a direction and a starting point established, the three of us began to chip away at the world of Innistrad, revealing each secret in turn. And while our starting point was the same, we quickly branched out and began covering ground rapidly.

Closing the Door On Innistrad, Part 1

The Innistrad expansion block of Magic: the Gathering has come to an end, and before I put it to rest, I want to go back to its beginning. At least my involvement in its beginning. Several times I've teased the idea of a post wherein I talk about the concepting process. I thought I'd write some fun stuff and maybe get the other guys involved to contribute. Possibly even do a round robin of articles for our various blogs or some such. Turns out that coordinating such things requires more time than I can currently afford to spend on the blog. While a post like this, where I simply ruminate on my own, can be done in fits and starts throughout my schedule, actually planning ahead has proven to be much more difficult. I just have too many projects to juggle right now. However, given Innistrad's waning relevance, it seemed imperative that I put something together. This and the next couple posts are that thing. Perhaps if I get called upon to contribute on another Magic concept push, I'll have the wherewithal and forethought to do a daily diary, but for now, for Innistrad, this post will just have to do.

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In the beginning of May 2010, I found myself slogging through sketch changes to the cover for Badass: Birth of Legend, minding my own business. I want to stress that last part because I rarely look for trouble, and almost never go searching for major projects that will mess up an already full schedule. Unprecedented was the fact that I had actually planned out the timing for my various jobs fairly well so that I wouldn't be too stressed over time management and could actually enjoy the summer. Or so I'd thought. Richard Whitters had other plans.

Richard, for those of you who don't know, is the lead concept artist at Wizards of the Coast. He's got a staff job which requires him to endure sitting one cubicle wall away from Magic's art director, Jeremy Jarvis, and do whatever bidding is necessary. In short, he spends his days hunched over a pad of paper or a Wacom tablet creating many things that have come to fruition over his tenure, and many more that have not. He was also in charge of assembling a crack team of illustrators to help create the world that would eventually become Innistrad. Turns out I would be on this team.

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I got the email from Richard inquiring as to whether I'd be able to spend three weeks at Wizards' offices doing concept work for the upcoming Magic block. I would need to be there in three weeks. Now, the fact that Richard emailed me with such short notice indicated that I wasn't his first choice. I don't know who or how many had turned him down up to that point, but it didn't really matter. I intended to say yes. While you'd think I might be incensed that I wasn't considered the pick of the litter, I wasn't. Experience has taught me to just keep my head down and try to do a good job when called upon. Being the third or fourth — or even tenth — person called doesn't matter.  An opportunity is an opportunity, and you've got to make the most of those when they come.

I gave Richard the affirmative provided I could suss out the impact on my cover deadline, which thanks to the good graces of my art director at Harper Collins, I quickly managed to do. About a week after agreeing to join the team, my plane tickets were bought, my schedule was fixed, and my excitement finally subsided enough to recognize that I was missing a couple bits of vital information. First bit: what was the set's theme? Second bit: who would I be working with?

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Richard provided the following information: 1. The set was to be gothic horror themed. This was all I could get out of him. 2. My fellow artists would be Steve Prescott and Mike "Daarken" Lim.

Steve Prescott
I've known Steve for quite a while, having first met him at GenCon eight or nine years ago, and he's one of the most likeable people I've ever known. As I believe I've said before, he also happens to be one of the most naturally gifted draftsmen I've ever met, to boot. The combination of talent and personality results in a guy you wish you could hate but simply can't. At least I can't. Of the three of us, I believe he was the only one who'd done work concepting for Magic before, as he'd done a great deal of excellent work for the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block, much of which can be seen on his blog (link), as well as in his excellent book, Aggregate. Clearly Steve's roll was to be the foundation, the rock, the elder statesman, if you will.

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Mike "Daarken" Lim
Up to this point, I'd only known the guy as "Daarken." If I'm honest, I didn't know his real name or much about him. I saw him once at the Spectrum show opening at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators a year or two before. Someone pointed him out to me, so I had an idea of what he looked like. At the time I felt like I should have gone over and introduced myself, but I was afraid he'd just stare blankly at me having no idea who I was or why I was wasting his time. I didn't get the sense that he was that kind of guy, I just made a rather bold (and it turns out, inaccurate) assumption. Either way, he was a mystery to me, and I was a little nervous about meeting and working along side him. It seemed to me that his role was two sided: he was the finisher and the guy who had mastered the mystical art of digital painting — a skill that Steve and I both lack.

After being filled in, I prepped myself for the long haul ahead: three weeks holed up in a hotel adjacent to the Wizards offices in Renton, Washington, drawing all day and painting a cover piece by night. If nothing else, I was going to be productive. At least I hoped.

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