Magic: the Gathering Releases, With Background Info!

It's harder to keep track of when my illustrations are re-used on new Magic: the Gathering products, and over the past few months, a few have been--so here's a post to inform you of those.

Planechase comes in pre-constructed decks, two of which feature cards I illustrated. The deck "Strike Force" features Soul Warden, and the "Metallic Dreams" deck has Search for Tomorrow in it. I'm always amazed and gratified when I see Soul Warden reprinted again, as it's an old favorite, even well over a decade after painting it.

Next up on the tour of what's been missing is another pre-constructed deck. By pre-constructed, I mean that the decks are the same in each box, not randomized, and are tuned to be useful and playable as-is. As such, they can often serve as a better tool for learning this game, which can seem a bit intimidating from the outside. The Duel Decks: Garruk vs. Liliana product features a reprint of an even older card, Stampeding Wildebeest, which has also gone on to be reprinted many times over the years.

Soul Warden and Stampeding Wildebeest both have interesting stories attached to them. Sometimes, as an illustrator, you are asked to paint things which are cool, but would be even cooler, if.... In the case of these two paintings, each one asked for something that made better illustrations for the purposes of internal story-telling, but which would've made nicer pictures without, as an image divorced from the product. In Soul Warden, this mage was to be pictured blessing or casting some enchantment on warriors as they filed past her. I reduced this to a warrior, singular. I also preferred focusing on her casting these enchantments. The warrior itself was also pre-designed--it was to look like a certain type of creature, not one of my choosing, and this design was at odds with the more attractive main character I was portraying. So my solution was to paint the character filiing past, you mainly see its head, in shadow, with a mote of light floating over it. I painted this on a clear piece of frisket, or perhaps some other transparency, and adhered it to the painting so they could photograph it. When I had it returned, I simply removed it. The card image is here, and the final image, which I have used since, here.

With the Stampeding Wildebeest image, the same was done: it was not enough that I paint a herd of Gnus (I love that word), but I also had to paint a Mirage-era tribesman hiding from them. So, on the card, you have that character crouched under the tree, but on the painting, he was peeled off.

Lastly, the Premium Deck Series: Sliver is another of these pre-constructed thingies, focused upon these Sliver creatures, of which I have illustrated two over the years. So, naturally, my reprinted card here is an Island! Back in the Tempest block, I illustrated a sweep of Islands, and to my knowledge this is the first time any of them have been reprinted, and only one of the four painted was reprinted. It probably has a much nicer printing than the Tempest ones, as the resolution, colors and contrast have been upped dramatically since those days.

Incidentally, 3/4 of the reprints are from images done from 1998 and earlier. For reference, I was still living at home with may parents when those 3 were painted (Search for Tomorrow is more recent).

Well, normally these release-updates I don't count as real blog entries, but now that I've regaled you with background stories and history, I shall consider this my entry for this week. Not to mention I'm still way under a pile of things I need to finish otherwise!