I’ve been so excited for this card to come out. It can often take 10-12 months after you have done an illustration for Magic: the Gathering for the card to become public and it is always hard to be patient waiting for the new sets to come out. This card was different from most of the cards I have done for Magic. It is very calm and peaceful and the palette is a little different from my usual choice, I don’t often do a red/green pairing, but I loved the warmth of the colors together along with the gold accents and light.

I started the piece with some digital steps. First with a rough sketch done in Procreate. Just enough to get a feel for the final. Cynthia Sheppard was the AD on this set and card. Here is the sketch:

After the sketch was approved I created the background in 3D and hired a model to do a photo shoot. I used Blender (a very powerful and free 3D program) to create this scene. I felt like I needed to pull the camera back just a little bit and not crop in so tight. It helped with the framing of the actual card as well.

Here is my final digital comp that I created in Photoshop:

I drew some inspiration from some of John Singer Sargent’s paintings of the aristocracy, wanting to capture some of that high society/royal/noble air that Sargent painted so well. This painting in particular captured my eye. You can see I drew heavily on the pose Sargent used in his Countess of Lathom painting.

And the final painting:

This probably won’t come as surprise, but also created a video of the painting from start to finish. 🙂 Here is a link to the video on Youtube:

Thank you for giving my post a read!

Howard

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