Magic: the Gathering "Innistrad"

Blog readers have been reading background information on some of my artwork on this set, but this post is primarily for my homepage readers, who'll see this announcement of a new product using my illustrations.

Indeed, my work can be seen in the new Magic: the Gathering release, "Innistrad." White-backed artist proof cards are available now, as well (including the flip-card I illustrated, which was issued as 2 separate proof cards).

As well, I did process write-ups of most of the art, Grizzled Outcasts in two parts (1 | 2), Krallenhorde Wantons, Ghoulcaller's Chant, and Dead Weight.

Magic Innistrad: "Ghoulcaller's Chant"

A crypt. Something undead emerging from a coffin or whatever. That was basically all I had to go on, and it was enough.

I've certainly visited enough old graveyards to have a pre-existing attraction to old crypts. And, having visited a number of old European cathedrals and even the Cloisters Museum in my neighborhood, I've seen enough old stone coffins. I've always loved how thick they are, how nicely carved. Those were my starting points.

Innistrad had a couple of art direction rules, one of which was that there were to be no "helicopter shots." Meaning, shots from so high up that it detaches the viewer from what's happening. All camera angles were to be composed so that the viewer is himself in the world. A subtle thing, perhaps. One of my thumbnails had a top-view (left), in which you would be standing above the coffin as its lid is being slid away. I kinda liked it, though I would have eventually changed the arms to either both be over the lip of the coffin, or both pushing the lid, as it's awkward like this. Not impossible--I pantomimed it first, but just awkward. Technically this isn't a helicopter-shot, but it wasn't worth me sketching it out to be rejected, given it was on the line, so I left it alone. I did return to a part of it, which I'll get to in the next Innistrad post.

Most images still start with some kind of photo-reference, in which I or others I can rope in get to pose and look ridiculous. I'm just vain enough to not show them here, but others love this bit of cheese. The incredible comic artist Paolo Rivera, for instance, has a weekly installment on his blog, over 100 posts long already, showing off just this sort of thing (here's a link to just that series, but see the rest of his blog, too).

Using the self-timer on my camera, I played with a few hand poses based on the thumbnail I eventually chose. Good times. Much as you can eventually learn to fake lighting, there's nothing like the real thing to show you contours and shadows you would never have thought up on your own. With the real thing in place, you can often fake extra bits and have a nice convincing mix. Once I choose my reference photo, I always knock it to grayscale. After all, I don't use colored gels or anything when I take photographs, and don't use costuming I actually intend to use in the final, so there is little need for color reference. Additionally, having it will often subconsciously make me want to use it in the painting. For something like a traditional portrait or landscape, it might be helpful to have it, but for fantasy illustration, I just drop it entirely.

"Ghoulcaller's Chant" study, purchase information here

Shortly before doing the actual study (but after I'd decided which composition to pursue), I attended a concert here in NYC with a good friend, to see Interpol. The concert was held at the United Palace Theater, an old historic venue, which now occasionally hosts concerts, and within walking distance from home, which was a bonus. I'd never been inside before, and was blown away by the...generous amount of decoration encrusted all over everything. It was a good thing to see at just this moment, and I took some photos for inspiration later. Without having gone to that show, the decoration here would undoubtedly have not been as interesting. So, fortuitous timing.

I was to also indicate some sort of magical smoke or wisps of whatever, which, coupled with the lighting, would clue you in that there be magic afoot. Having lovingly rendered the coffin and all that, I was hesitant to wipe it out with an eraser and white charcoal, at least without knowing exactly what I was doing. So I added that in digitally (left) and also lightened the value of the crypt's gate, so it wouldn't compete as much with the fingers, while blowing out the light a bit more from the coffin. As you can see, once again I am using a very light value for the area outside, though in the end it would be night time.

I needed to make my own healthy hands into the dessicated flesh of the dead. A little anatomy was helpful here, and a sort of imagining what the sinews would look like minus the fat and fluid, for instance around the tendons on the thumb, and so on. A ring worn that once fit is now totally loose. From there, off to paint.

"Ghoulcaller's Chant" final painting, purchase information here

I toned down the magic smoke stuff a bit, primarily to not obscure the decoration too much. You'll also note that I changed the doorway a bit once more--going dark above to obscured and light below, as a creeping fog enters. The fog allowed me to push the wrought iron back to not compete with the fingers, and darkening the top a bit means you don't look primarily at the highest pointing index finger, but a little lower than that.

Magic Innistrad: "Krallenhorde Wantons"

Look, I don't name these things. The flip side to last week's "Grizzled Outcasts" was not called this when it was assigned. I don't remember exactly, but it was something like "Grizzled Pack." And actually, the word "Grizzled" wasn't in the original title, either. It's just how these things work. I don't know what it is to be Krallen, or what makes the horde feel wanton, an apt word for sure, but in modern parlance Merriam-Webster's definition #2 is the most often used....

...So in the age of the interwebz, I think it is a crime to allow oneself to go ignorant of facts for very long when the Incredible Answer Machine is right at your fingertips. So Krallen is deutsch for Claws. Don't say I never taught you anything. Unless you're German or speak German, in which case it's possible I still may never have taught you anything. I'll teach you something yet!

Two entries ago, I mentioned there were cues I needed to maintain from human-to-werewolves to make sure you knew who was who. One thing I decided to do was to spread the range of human types. The other thing I hinted at last week but didn't get to.

When I did the study for "Grizzled Outcasts" I mentioned that it was done in charcoal, and it was. There weren't any branches yet, though. Just the figures. From there I moved to the study for "Krallenhorde Wantons." Having established that the now-werewolves were going to pop into town to borrow a cup of sugar or whatever, I decided that what I'd have them doing would be ripping apart a set of thick lead glass windows. Apparently there was no sugar, and now they are wanton.

"Krallenhorde Wantons" study, purchase information here

Whereas the first painting was to be quite light-toned, this one would be dark, night. I don't often paint night as black, even though in reality it kinda is. No, I usually illuminate the sky a bit, and simply through color temperature and saturation you can usually sell the night aspect. You'd be surprised how light a sky you can paint and sell it as night. I've seen night skies that are basically 50% dark on the value scale (or lighter)--a completely middle value--the actual value of a blue sky during daytime when you look up, for instance, and it can read as night simply by controlling color and temperature. In this case, the sky goes to about 60% dark at its brightest.

In the study above, it's not quite that dark. Before submitting it, I decided to darken it more because the window frame was making the piece too busy in the upper corners, and the piece was not focusing your eyes anywhere in particular. That  was just added in digitally (left), and you can see that you look much more to the middle of the image now. I didn't go back into the study and darken it, too. Maybe I will yet.

I cheated a little, really, with the werewolves. I used color-coding to do a lot of the work, varying the color of the fur a bit to help translate the figures. In the case of the female at right, I used the fur she's wearing as the cue for making her werewolf form white. I also bunched a sort of mane of fur around her throat as a werewolf, too. It's cheating because that's not really part of her as a human, of course. But it reads. I also made her eyes quite dark. The black fellow has dark colored fur. Left-most guy has longer-than-usual tufts at his jaw. In the study he still has his eye scar, which I had to remove as I explained previously. And main dude has more of a goatee and sideburns, and "freckles." Here in the study, his mane starts farther back on his cranium, giving him the appearance of balding, which his human form is not. So you'll see that I changed this for the final. I swapped the positioning of the leftmost two characters simply for variety, since their left-to-right positioning was enough.

I was pretty excited to paint the effect of the thick lead glass, the way it would obscure and blur out what appears behind it.

So the last cue, one which is admittedly probably too subtle, was in the framing. As the window is being demolished, the wooden frame of the window has been bent and cracked and broken up. Having established this, I went back to the sketch for the Outcasts and sought to replicate the shapes created by the window frame in the branches themselves. This I drew with my ink brush, to emphasize their blackness, as I did on this study. I credit this to my Museum Studies, where I started using my ink brush quite a bit for different applications. So if you look at them, the general angles, verticals and horizontals of the branches are basically the same. I even went so far as to crack one branch on the right to create what otherwise would've been a rather unnatural descending vertical. I also bunched the complexity of the smaller branches into the areas where the glass is unbroken on this illustration (mostly). I didn't talk it up or anything, it was really something to please myself, so I was gratified that my Art Director Jeremy Jarvis noted it immediately with a thumbs-up in the sketch approvals. He's a super-sharp fellow though, so I wasn't surprised.

On to painting. Though the fog has lifted, to help sell night, one thing you can do is to mix a bit of gray into every color, and this is what I did. I mixed up the blue I generally wanted in the sky, then added a dollop of gray to it, and painted it. And so on for the rest of the painting. And though not as extreme as in the Outcasts piece, I also continued to use a bit of the value restraint on the further figures.

"Krallenhorde Wantons" final painting, purchase information here.

Painting the glass was fun, and time-consuming again, and something else that would've been a breeze digitally. Glass is often dirty, and when painting it, you want it to always be dirty if you can. I learned this when working on my Rorschach piece 3 years ago. By making it dirty, it has the properties of making everything behind it that is dark, lighter, and everything that is light, darker. It actually works a little like a fog layer, actually, and the dirtier the glass, the more the effect (shower or frosted glass pulls off the same trick by having the glass etched through sandblasting or some other treatment to scuff the glass significantly; the light going through it is greatly dispersed and reduced). So you can see that the darks get lighter, the lights get generally darker where the werewolves are concerned, and where the glass sits in front of the bright, white moon, it gets darker. Another helpful tidbit is that glass, if shabbily cleaned, accumulates more dirt around the frame than the bulk of the middle, which is usually wiped well. This also helps to sell the effect. Both of these lessons were learned in the aforementioned piece. The concentric-circle pattern was just me mentally mapping out the light and shadow--I had no reference for it, except for a lot of old decorative lead glass I saw in my travels in England.

As an illustrator, you have to please yourself. The overwhelming majority of those who see these pieces in print will not read this post. A select few will notice a couple of these things I've discussed. The rare few will note them all, or even figure out other things I did, some of which may have been entirely accidental. But they're not necessarily meant to be itemized by the viewer--rather these things are meant to come together and make a successful piece that is simply enjoyed. The little things, the tricks or clever bits are part of the problem-solving that makes spending many hours on each piece enjoyable on my end. If they please others, so much the better!

Tips & Techniques: Grizzled Outcasts and Value

I was all set to talk about "Krallenhorde Wantons" this week, and as I did I began to segue back to "Grizzled Outcasts," which segue turned into another post fully of the technical sort. I'll try to break it down so non-painters can make sense of it.

One thing from last week, which was kind of important but was left out...two things, actually. Thing One: Apart from having a light background, I also wanted a misty or foggy look. So while there's some distant foliage in the background, to help sell this I went about first graying out the entire palette, so that the overall color saturation is fairly low. Next, I staggered the characters in terms of distance from the viewer. Doing so in fog means that things further from you become grayer, and also lose their value range, collapsing to the value of the fog itself. This was somewhat evident in the study, but was something I worked at more for the painting.

 

A scan of my actual value scale, paint-stained and everything

In painting, one might work with a value scale either in their head or actually a physical value scale nearby. I eyeball a lot, but also have two printed out. One of them is my standard go-to and is actually broken into 6 steps: 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100% where 0 is white and 100 is black. When needed, I'll hold it next to colors mixed on my palette, or next to an item being painted, to ensure I'm staying close to my grayscale/value study done in the preparatory phase.

Here's the image in grayscale / value, for reference

So, recognizing that the nearest figure should have the areas of darkest shadow, I basically moved up the scale a bit for each receding figure, such that if the closest character has a black point of about 90%, the next further character registers a darkest value of about 80%, and the outermost two have black points of about 70% of black. Simple enough of a formula. The problem was I painted it back-to-front to create good overlaps. This means that the first figure I painted was the leftmost. When you try to paint a figure whose darkest shadows are only about 70% black, it can play with your head without context. I probably swiped some darker pigment into the shadows of the foreground figures to reassure myself that it would look ok as I proceeded forward, but I don't remember. That's what I'd recommend, anyway. Nevertheless, I recall it being a leap of faith to paint the two back figures with that limited value range--asian hair is often raven black, after all! This is part of where having a definite grayscale formula in mind or next to you is very helpful. As I moved forward, each figure helped to set the context for the next one, and I think it worked out ok. It was a matter of pure restraint to keep from darkening the shadows more than I did.

Even in Photoshop 7, this is a piece of cake vs. real paint

I should pause and note that what I'm describing here is simply a piece of cake, digitally. Digitally I might've just painted each figure with a full, normal value and color range, since that's easiest to do--you're not compensating for value, which can come out wrong. You're also not constantly keeping your color saturation level in mind while you're painting. I would have just painted everything fairly normally. The background would've had its gray tone across the entire digital canvas. Each figure would be its own layer, and using perhaps a Levels and a Saturation Adjustment Layer in Photoshop (one set per figure) I could've tightly controlled the graying out of color on a per-figure basis, and also adjusted the value levels exactly how I wanted them. It would've taken a couple of minutes to tweak, tops, and the digital painting would have gone much faster.

Instead, I made great use of my value scale, holding it up as I worked, tweaking color mixtures appropriately, and so on, testing dabs of paint, wiping them off, adjusting the mix, then painting. A challenge and a bit of a pain in the rear at the same time. This sort of composition was made for digital.

Lastly, the foremost figure itself does not have its shadows sink quite to 100% black, simply because there were still the branches to do. Being the foremost object, and wanting that moist autumn darkness to their bark, I saved pure black for that "layer," and having restrained my hand all the way through, managed to create a fairly convincing set of overlaps and atmospheric depth, without getting all scientific about it. I mean, there were some other rules I could have or should have kept in mind to really sell it even more, but a man has to eat and further refinements to the scheme would have set me back even longer. To have suddenly flipped the scheme in the foreground and used light-colored branches like birch would have required the figures be dressed in dark colors, otherwise it would have flattened the composition completely.

The topic just discussed is something that comes into play to some extent or other in a lot of paintings, really. But, being that this piece was such a great example of it in a rather clear way, it made sense to bring it up here.

I mentioned there were two things left to discuss. Thing Two I'll postpone til the next installment, when I actually cover the flip side, "Krallenhorde Wantons."

Magic Innistrad: "Grizzled Outcasts"

It's always a fantastic surprise to be a part of the first wave of a new Magic: the Gathering block. For the uninitiated, each year, 3 sets of cards (one large, two small) are released that explore a storyline and theme set somewhere in Magic's Multiverse. Essentially, this allows for a yearly reboot of the story and visual style of a phenomenally creative game. Occasionally I've been given inside hints as to the genre or theme of a coming story arc, but I've never been privy to concept art beforehand, for instance--even when I've known the illustrators involved. It's a responsibility I wouldn't want, as leaking this information is deadly serious business, and I wouldn't even want to accidentally mumble a secret in my sleep and have a neighbor hear through an open window.

But when I've had the privilege of being on the first set of a new block, checking out the style guide for it is always a ton of fun. Not only is there great art in it, but great possibilities, and the knowledge that if I am able to participate in more of the block, I'll be living in the world for a good nine months or so. It's just enough time to marinade in it and absorb it, but not enough to get bored before the game is off to the next thing.

So, for this year's set we have something which one might sum up as Magic's take on Gothic Horror. Given how far Magic has stretched the notions of what fantasy art is, it's always fun to see it move closer to home, as it were. New to the game are werewolf cards, wherein characters are featured in their normal form on one side, and werewolf form on the other. I think Rage did something like this years back, also with werewolves, but I didn't work on that game.

I was assigned one such card, and will discuss the flip-card design components in this and next week's installment. For this week, we have, "Grizzled Outcasts."

In this case, we had four, well, grizzled outcasts, who have banded together and live outside the towns. They were to appear united, and suspicious of those who might encounter them. Though this was essentially a "line-up" of characters, I figured I'd use some branches or foliage in the foreground to create a barrier between the viewer and our crew. On the flip-side, I was to portray the same four, who by night head back into town to sort of say hi to those who cast them out. Very neighborly.

Though I often do digital thumbnails, in this case I did a group the old-fashioned way.

In all the werewolf art, you'll see that the artists were instructed to create visual cues from front-to-back so that the characters could be understood to be the same on both sides. The werewolves themselves were to also have identifying characteristics. So, for single figures, many artists went for mirror-image compositions, for instance. For four figures, it was a little tougher. I sought two ways of fulfilling this goal, and one of them was just to create a wider-than-usual gamut of physical types to transform into werewolves. This allowed me a great excuse to introduce more ethnicities into the illustration, which Magic is always grateful for. What we westerners know as fantasy art has a long history of being primarily of a Western/European template, and with Innistrad itself moving back to a more European-inspired approach in terms of setting, I figured this variety would also just make a nice visual treat.

So, I picked one asian woman and one black male character. I gave another guy an eye patch and a hunch, and there's default dude there, too. I didn't want to go all United Nations and overkill it.

"Grizzled Outcasts" study, purchase information here

I busted out my charcoals and did this "sketch" (the term is losing its meaning a bit the more I develop these, shall we say "study" instead?). One can see a couple of changes that were already being made. Intentionally: the patch on the leftmost character was boring. Instead, I gashed his entire right eye shut, and intended to replicate this on the flipside. The walking stick the next guy is holding no longer appears at the top of the composition--as I went from thumbnail to study, I had to compress the figures in more, and there just wasn't room at the top of the frame anymore. I initially thought he might have some fish or something hanging off it. Would've been a nice touch, but had to go. Unintentionally: the leftmost character had a high collar and a kerchief or something blocking most of his face. By the time the study rolled around this was gone, and I'm not sure why. In retrospect, I might've left this detail.

Innistrad has a lot of costuming, and the goal of making it look worn, particularly for these grizzled outcasts. They shouldn't look completely threadbare and impoverished--after all these were people outcast from the local town--who knows what sorts of lives they led before being infected with lycanthropy? So some of them have rather nice clothing, even nice furs. Modified tricorn hats feature prominently on the humans in this society. But with my black character I opted against it, just to break it up. But then again, what hair style to give him? Surely African tribal hairdos, which might otherwise rock Magic's world just fine, were out of the question. But blacks aren't going to be found in most European art going back to that era either, to see what they were wearing. I went to the civil war and looked at photos a bit, but most men seemed to simply wear a simple afro of varying length, usually fairly short. Hmm. So instead I went Frederick Douglass. One of Magic's keywords, with regards to artwork, is the word, "Badass." Well, Frederick Douglass was a badass if ever there was one. Granted, he was primarily an intellectual badass, but still. And he had a rockin' hairdo. I don't pretend he was the only fellow wearing his hair like that, necessarily, but being famous in his day, we have the luxury of having lots of photos of him. So, Frederick Douglass. Badass.

I was told to lose the eye scar, as another artist had already done that fairly prominently. Shoot. So, I simply emphasized the corners of his beard near his jaw. That would be one cue.

"Grizzled Outcasts" final painting, larger view and purchase information here

 There are two other tweaks that I made along the way. First off, the walking stick was anemic in the sketch, so I made it a nice branch with character. Second, the spacing of the characters had the main guy's elbow tangenting with our female's bosom, which was a bad idea. So I brought that figure in a touch.

The last thing of note is the environment, which is foggy and lighter in tone than my usual. First, with a composition featuring four figures, simplifying shapes was going to be key. Also, empty or negative space was going to be necessary. It was for this reason that I varied the heights and positioning of the characters to a triangle leading to the main guy, and why I opted for there being a nice negative space to his right, so he still has visual supremacy. The werewolves were obviously going to be shown at night, so I wanted the contrast with day to be clear. I also changed the manner of patching on the sleeve of main guy and added a clasp to the overcoat on the leftmost figure. Little changes like these often happen throughout the process.

And next week, we'll discuss the flipside of this image.