Magic The Gathering: Camellia, the Seedmiser

Last year I was asked by Wizards of the Coast to do some Magic the Gathering card art for their upcoming animal set Bloomburrow (https://magic.wizards.com/en/products/bloomburrow). I played a lot of MtG back in the mid/late 90's, so it was an honor and thrill to become a part of the fraternity of MtG illustrators.

Here is Camellia, the Seedmiser. Squirrels are green/black mana cards with a penchant for bones. The set is in previews now and will be released August 2nd, and since Wizards of the Coast has already revealed my version of this card, I can share the artwork and process for creating it.

It began with a brief from my art director asking for Camellia descending stairs as a haughty diva showing off her leaf dress. 

I started with just squirrel anatomy poses at first until I had one I thought might be a good pose that conveyed 'diva'. On my lightpad though I made several redraws and iterations adding different costuming, trying a few hand poses, and because Julia suggested it––her tail draped over her arm like a stole. The branch and skull setting was suggested from the source material reference as well as the brief. I looked at some real animal skulls for reference.

The pencil roughs were assembled and combined digitally in Photoshop. At this stage, I also like to do a preliminary digital color blocking, to make sure I have the color and value tangents worked out, and also to show my art director at WotC so they are on the same page as I am (no one likes surprises in the later stages of a commissioned art piece). This is the stage where I can also easily make adjustments moving a character or resizing something.

With the pencils/layouts approved by my art director, I moved on to inks. I printed the digital composite out and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my Huion Lightpad, I was able to see through the surface of the bristol to use the printout as a guide as I inked with Copic Multiliner SP pens. The art director for this card requested not to have any large or dense areas of black, so I kept the linework fairly open and was restrained with the amount of texture.

The inks were then scanned back into Photoshop where I could start the coloring process. This stage. called flatting' is the professional version of coloring-in-the-lines. Just flat color is placed in to establish everything's base colors. the art director also liked when my linework was softer in my Mouse Guard work, and wanted everything to have a dark brown color hold (ink lines colored to be something other than black). I also established other color holds on all the dress trim and details as well as the background to add depth.

Here are the final rendered colors for the art (sans card borders). I did the light and shadow and texture by using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop with a stock textured brush. There was a last minute edit at the request of the art director to add more green, so I intensified the glow coming from the left to be unnatural light.

I have prints and playmats of Camellia available for sale: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/category/magic.