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.

Style Guides

Most commercial artists, both for Magic: The Gathering and other works, follow a style guide when creating artwork. This has not always been the case for Wizards who, for the first few years of Magic: The Gatherings existence, omitted style guides from the process. This led to some confusing interpretations of cards and some of Magic's more iconically strange artworks. Wizards.com has several articles on the history of its art and the impact having a style guide (or not having one) had on the Multiverse.

The articles are very interesting and can be found here:
The Magic Style Guide Part 1: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mc3
The Magic Style Guide Part 1.5: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mc4
The Magic Style Guide Part 2: https://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mc5

Magic: The Gathering started using a Style Guide in it's "Tempest" set, the first set of cards in the "Tempest" block. Tempest is the 12th card set of Magic: The Gathering, released in October 1997. This means that Wizards went 12 sets and 4 years without using a Style Guide - which produced some issues for it's artists and players.

The following art is from the "Ice Age" block, the 11th set released in 1995. Upon hearing the name "Ice Age" appropriate imagery comes to mind, which had worked for previous card sets. However, Ice Age had a race of people known as the "Balduvians" who resided in the universe and, without a style guide, artistic license was taken with their appearance. The following is artwork that appeared on cards from different artists depicting the Balduvians.

Although there are some similarities, the variance is still wild in some artwork. This is when a Style Guide would have created a much more unified look.

Mirroden Notes

The Following is a set of written guides for the art style of the "Mirroden" Block.

From looking at the rules, suddenly what is obvious is thrown out the window and new ideas need to be created to compliment the world created. I will challenge myself to create artwork adhering to these rules.

Noah Bradley's "How to Start a Painting"

Noah Bradley is a very successful artist who has worked with a myriad of large companies. His workshops cost anywhere between $200 and $2000, so when he releases a tutorial for free it's unmissable. I'll be going through this tutorial to learn about some of his techniques when initialising an idea.

http://www.noahbradley.com/blog/2012/how-to-start-a-painting/

Brush strokes

A little bit of practice in brush strokes and creating an environment in which to place a character. Conceptual artists have to capture ideas quickly and boldly to give the impression of their idea to a client. This environment was created in less than 20 minutes to reflect that. I tried to give more of an impression of mood more than anything else and all brush strokes are left apparent.

Creating an end Goal.

After working on a few images that will be posted shortly, I've found that it's all well and good to create pieces, but without a more specific end goal I find I have less of a focus on the challenges I should set myself. With this in mind I have decided to contextualise my final piece.

I will be reworking artwork found on a Magic the Gathering card. For example, the artwork for "Joven's Ferrets" is known throughout the magic community as being pretty "awful". The artwork itself isn't all that bad, but it doesn't inspire people to feel attached to the card or respect it. Magic the Gathering is very much centralised around its artwork, so good, striking artwork creates nostalgia and love for that card, regardless of it's individual strength. I would take such a card and recreate the artwork under the internal environment that Wizards of the Coast commissioned me to do such a thing.

This allows me to work more to the guidelines commercial artists would work through when creating a piece for a large company, and also allows me to inject more of my passions into my work in this module.

First Tutorial

This is a breakdown of the 1st two hours of my first tutorial. It is hosted at:
http://hannsaki.deviantart.com/art/digital-painting-tutorial-pt-1-90347578 and was created by an artist known as hannsaki.

The following are several layers, although the original is done on two layers, I feel that more would provide a less stressfull envionment and more control over the piece. It also allows me to create a breakdown for future use.

Starting off with a little sketch of the character.

Blocking out the background.

Planning the lighting.

Working out the background composition.

Adding details here and there.

Early Vision Statement

Over the course of the semester I will be hoping to complete several of the tutorials hosted at
http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/articles/20-tutorials-for-learning-digital-painting-techniques.
I will be completing these in order to advance my digital painting skills, in particular painting colour and texture techniques. As of right now, my goal is to use these tutorials and others like them to create a large scale piece of art, or several pieces, utilising the process of established commercial artists.

In my work I have found that I am very good at creating small characters with little or no context. These characters may look good but without the skill to create the world around them I feel that they appear very flat and, forgive the pun, 2 Dimensional.

With this in mind I will be studying, along with Photoshop techniques, the process artists use when creating a commercialised work. From the thumbnail to the £200 print on the wall, and the iterative nature of artistic progression.