Bloomburrow Tee

Wizards of the Coast asked me to do artwork for a tee-shirt that the Bloomburrow team would have for the release, when demoing the game, and as a memento of the new card set from Magic the Gathering.
I was given a lot of free reign and asked to draw an adventurer from Bloomburrow in my own style that summed up the cozy but serious vibes the setting provided. They also asked me to hand letter a version of the logo, but allowed me to take liberties with it. Of course, because it was a silk-screened shirt, there were color limitations.

To the left you can see the baseball version of the tee WotC sent me, but below I'll go through the steps for creating the art.

I was given options for the species of the focus of the tee: Bird, Bat, or Frog (though I think they were open to me trying another animal if I felt strongly about it). The art brief asked for the Planeswalker logo and for the design to be self contained, so I decided I'd draw a border of natural plant elements with the symbol at the top (I also liked the idea of a circle of the mana symbols at the bottom to balance it out. I sent over a bird, frog, and bat rough options, each with their own border plant details to echo some of those species mana colors.

The Art Director liked the frog version best, but asked for a few changes: to make the water magic more swirly, to make it overall oval shaped, and to add bugs to the border. I tightened up the pencil drawings of the frogfolk and the new round border as well as adding in some ladybugs (which I thought had a nice easy to see pattern that wouldn't get lost in the detail of the border line chaos).

These pencil drawings were all assembled in Photoshop and tinted to ultimately help me see everything clearer when I'd get to the next step.

Before I could start inking, there was one more request to change out a few of the ladybugs for other insects, so one became a grasshopper and the other a moth. 

I printed this big piece out and taped it to the back of a 14" x 17" sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my Huion lightpad, I could see through the surface of the bristol to the pencils underneath and use them as a guide. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (I think just the 0.7 nib)

I scanned the inks so I could start on breaking down the colors for a limited color silk-screened shirt.

I first tried with a three color and a four color pass (each color on its own layer to make it easier for the silkscrener).

Happier with the four color version I turned it in to the Art Director––but he surprised me by suggesting to add some more colors to make the water magic pop in the final.

Here is the finished art I sent off to WotC for the shirt. They ended up swapping out my hand-drawn Bloomburrow logo for the official one (never heard why). Someday for fun I'll see what it would look like if I did a full color render of this art.