Homelands: The Making of a Magic Set

Homelands is considered one of, if not the, worst magic sets every printed. Not because of the vision or the mechanics, but because the cards themselves were all under powered. Wizards hae published a fantastic article detailing the process of creating Magic's first Theme-based set - which can be found here.

https://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/157

The article includes images from the illusive style guide, namely images of ferrets.

It's surprising that the artwork for Joven's ferrets was so poor, considering that these are all fantastically jovial images.

Excerpts from the article relating to the art.
"While the playtest groups were busy creating decks and strategies with the new cards, Kyle and Scott put together the list of cards and card titles for Sandra (Everingham) Garavito, art director for Magic A Magic artist herself, Sandra worked with the designers to prepare a package for the artists that would explain the history and context of the cards they would be representing. Guidelines on how the actual image should appear, however, were kept to a minimum. In keeping with the original diverse spirit of Magic, Sandra worked to make sure that the artists' vision wasn't compromised by too much artistic direction."

Sandra worked with the designers to make a few specific requests of the artists. "We wanted each group of related cards to be represented by one artist who style complemented the characters," notes Scott. Artists Pete Venters and Christopher Rush were singled out early on by the designers for particular concepts. Pete was asked to portray the royal family of Sengir, and Chris was also given a choice of several other cards and immediately chose Eron the Relentless, one of the chief figures among the red cards, and Rashka the Slayer, a Vampire hunter. "I wanted the Baron Sengir but he was taken, so I took the character that wanted to kill him," recalls Chris.
As the artists received their card titles and the histories, the final reports from the playtesters began to arrive. By mid-April, all the results had been gathered, and the R&D team set to work considering the opinions and concerns of the playtesters. Most cards required minor adjustments to statistics or casting cost; others were completely re-written. Since the artists had already begun creating the pictures according to the titles and descriptions sent to them weeks earlier, the developers attempted to keep the new powers in line with the artwork in progress.
...
In May, Sandra began to receive the finished paintings from the artists. Every time another package arrived in the mail, she took the new painting to Kyle and Scott for final approval. Both the designers were stunned to see the visions that their project had influenced. According to Scott, "Seeing the story we had worked on for so long come to life in the artwork was incredible—it was perfect!"

As the art continued to arrive, the process of putting the actual cards together began. The art was scanned onto computer and placed in the familiar Magic card borders. The cards then entered typesetting, during with the card text, art, and borders were assembled into complete cards. Meanwhile, R&D worked out where each card should appear on the press sheets, large grids which would be printed, cut into individual cards, and sorted into boosters.

All in all its a very insightful read on the production line for Magic.