Magic The Gathering: Helga, Skittish Seer

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 Helga, Skittish Seer, one of the Frogfolk, who despite bing my 3rd card revealed, was my first to draw. The set was released in early August, and since Wizards of the Coast has already revealed my version of this card, I can share the artwork and process for creating it.

The process started with the brief from my art director Aliana Rood
asking for Helga, a  Lemur Tree Frog sitting on the banks of a pond staring into the distance while absentmindedly conjuring water magic. They wanted a tone of adolescent angst and loneliness. WotC provided me with an enormous PDF with reference for the frogs and their clothing as well as reference for Helga's specific character design. 

I started with a pencil version of Helga on copy paper to get the pose and mood of the character right. I then placed another sheet of copt paper over her on a lightpad and drew her costuming. The brief also called for a specific blend of frogfolk and ratfolk architecture in the background, so that was done on another sheet as well which is why there is a void on the background pencils. Lastly I penciled a version of her twisty water magic.

All of those pencil roughs were assembled and combined digitally in Photoshop as well as tweaked with reproportioning and rotating elements. 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). 

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 Helga's eyes, the water bits, and the entire background. 

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.

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