Sh'elved

I thought I'd put one last Shadowmoor block piece up before moving on, Medicine Runner (Swift Dawnhand to me). I like the tone of this card and they way the lighting turned out, maybe because it didn't run away with itself. Looking back, it possibly did on some of the other cards, they look a bit busy colour wise....I guess it's subjective. It was one of the last cards I did for the set (I think) so maybe that's why. I finished this one off at the Wizards offices actually, while I was helping concept out Alara. Used to working from home alone it was a bit strange to be doing work in public, so to speak. I had various people dropping past to see what I was doing in the office so early, most of them liked the rendering of the tree in the foreground...I like how stark the image is, there's very little fuss to it so it feels very quiet.

Here's the sketch (talk about vague) and then my pencils and the finish. You can see that i changed the arm from the sketch to the finish, I think i did that to isolate the medicine bag a little more as it needed to be one of the "important" things in the image.

Swamp/Forest

I got to sign quite a few swamps and forests from Shadowmoor at Kobe and thought it would be nice to show it in it's complete landscape format. When I went looking for it I was surprised by how much I liked the sketch, it's very moody and I think it works well all by itself.


The finish is a lot more colourful, mostly to help establish the ott magic/spooky wood effect that Wizards wanted this set to have. It's also a lot brighter with more contrast to help it work better at it's intended size. This was one of those pieces that's colour palette changed over and over before I was happy (easy'ish when you use photoshop). I lied the idea of using pink for a swamp card though.


I'm not sure why I handed in such a detailed sketch for this piece, I think I was happy to get some basic lands to do and had plenty of time so went to town on it. It's not that I don't do descent pencils for my finishes I just tend to see sketches as rough ideas as opposed to something that's just about to go to finish (like many artists do), I find it helps to keep things moving if there's any changes needed fro the art director side. In fact I'll try to show that process in a bit more detail next time I post something up.

Overbeing

The Overbeing piece that was used for the Orb of Eventide at the magic site is in the visual spoiler list now, so I had a look to see what I had for it and figured it was worth popping up. I can't find the initial brief, but I remember it had to be someone worshiping a giant forest spirit thing, and she had giant owl(s) with her.


It was pretty straight run this piece, the only hick-up I had was in the initial sketch. The giant owl I put in was, well, too giant, and ended up making her look like she was small and had wings. Mostly my sketch was a bit pedestrian and confusing (or it failed on all counts ;) Here's what was said.

[Overbeing] Chippy
Nice!
Some scale issues here, though.
The huge single owl is kinda making her look small... And also like she can fly, which she cant.
Both of those things need to be mitigated a bit.
Filling the frame with her also will contribute to scale.
I would also like to see her pushed even a bit further from human proportions.

So in the next pass I kept the main pose of the characters and started to think of how I could light her from the inside, like she radiated some sort of godly energy, and I struck on the idea that maybe her soul was visible as some sort of flower, and then I used her body to protect it, creating a living wooden rib cage. All a bit far out, but the idea broke me away from the human form and I now had something powerful to work with on the Overbeing other than the owls. This was the revised sketch that was approved.


When i went to final I wanted to take the Overbeing even further away from the material world, so I enlarged her robes helping her to look more regal and aloof, but more importantly it hid her leg. This detached her from the ground and the material world a bit ore. Other than that it was pretty much just rendering and playing with the tonal composition again for the lighting. I think the worshiper looked better in the sketch, as they gave the event more animation, like the Overbeing has just appeared in all its splendour and the worshiper was being pushed back by the awesomeness of it. The worshiper in the final, looks a little too blaze, as if they speak to the Overbeing all the time.

The Colour of Magic

It might start to look like i go cruising the magic web site just to see if there's any of my work up there...it's partly true, but this one, used for the Orb od Eventide was pointed out to me by Mr Allsop. I had to blink when I saw it, I had forgotten just how colourful I made these pieces and it got me to thinking about how I express magic.
I was a big fan of the Terry Pratchett's discworld books when i was younger and they heavily influenced how I thought about fantasy, he has a great imagination for the 'what if' (what if light was one of the slowest things in the universe...) and a love of making the intangible, tangible. Reading his books he explained magic had some form of colour, and maybe it had some sort of substance, that you could hold it (carefully I would imagine , and probably with some sort of special gloves ). That notion stuck with me.
Magic the Gathering extends very neatly into this world view, especially for me as an artist. I'm having to visualy represent magic quite a lot within it, and the magic is broken up into different colours, that usualy have to be reflected in the feel of the art. This worked especially well in the post apocalyptic block of magic, Time Spiral . In this return to the now ravished, disintegrating, depiction of Dominaria, magic (or mana) was to be depicted as quite rare and precious. This was natural for me to express by simply removing most of the colour from my work and concentrating it in any magical effect (if any) that might be going on within the piece.
So when I was invited to work on the Shadowmoor I noticed that this was a kind of fairy world, a world, in my mind at least, constructed entirely of magic. So I was able to take all this colour I'd been saving up from Time Spiral set, and let it rip into most of the pieces i did for Shadowmoor. The results were, well, colourful. Here's a direct comparison of a Time Spiral piece “Voidmage Husher” and below that a Shadowmoor one “Advice from the Fae".

Fight!

I thought I'd put up another of the wallpapers I spotted over at the Magic web site, Shapeshifter's Marrow. This one was originally entitled "mirror image" and they wanted to have two dragons fighting, one red and one blue, the blue one was the "mirror" and I was to show that it was made of blue mana (energy). Actually here's the initial brief.



This was the second time I've been asked to paint straight up dragons, so I was pretty excited about the piece, and I had a great time thinking up ideas for what the fight might look like, heres a couple of the initial ideas, followed by the final sketch I submitted to Wizards. The final sketch is quite straightforward compared to some of the ideas I had, mainly because it keeps the image simple (this is going to be just over an inch wide when printed) and also i didn't think my abilities would stand the test of the more complex wing wraparounds.





One of the things I've tried to get into the habit of doing is building maquettes to study lighting, and that's what I ended up doing here. I have to say looking back on them now that I could have lit it much better, it's pretty pedestrian and i didn't give myself much to play with here. I should really try and rig up a little lighting booth and maybe get a couple of light sources in it...anyway, that's a project for another day.


This is the final I submitted, and it was sent straight back. All the punch of the original sketch was gone and Jeremy wanted me to get that back in. This is a real problem I have, which I'm getting to grips with now, I get hung up on the rendering of a piece and consequently the dynamism of it suffers. It's something that I'll talk about at a later point.
So I went back to the sketch and looked to see what was in there, bu not in the final. Really it's just the punch of the lighting, so it was easily fixed, along with the wings which Jeremy felt were too ethereal.




Looking back on it now, I would have loved to do the wrap around wing fight, but this one holds up the brief.

Rootcutters

The wallpaper archive at the Wotc site is a great place for seeing Magic art nice and big. While looking through there for inspiration, I noticed that my Rootcutters piece was up (always a nice pat on the back to get :). It wasn't called that when I painted it though, which is why sometimes it's hard to remember your own card list, because you usually know them all by different names. Anyway, I remembered that I still had the sketch and some colour thumbs for that on my hard drive so i thought I'd put them up here.


The sketch, for me, was really solid, normally my sketches for magic are pretty vague. I'm always thankful to Jeremy Jarvis for letting these wishy washy sketches go through, as it makes the whole process a lot less like a commission, and more like the development of an idea, allowing me to not feel overly constrained in the finished work, but like I say, this one was pretty tight.


The other thing I still have saved for this piece are some colour thumbs. I do these when I'm not sure where a piece is going colour/composition wise. I just grab a copy of the whole image, shrink it down and then make a bunch of copies of it. Then i just play about until I find something that's beginning to work. Even on the computer i find I can start to treat the finished piece as"precious" and be unwilling to experiment, so this helps break that. Reducing the size of the image forces me to work on the over all composition, as i have a tendency to get hung up on details too much (and it also helps with lag). Doing multiple versions means i can compare and contrast the experiments.


And here's the finished piece. I have to say there's a lot in the pencils I wish I'd got into the finish, I really loved that tail in the sketch.