-By Jesper Ejsing

This illustration for Magic the Gathering, is a kind of a twin to the Baloth monster I showed some weeks back. The description was a charging beast with hooves and giant horns.

I did 2 sketches. One,  which you could argue is totally wrong, since it is resting and looking mean and badass, but not charging at all. And one with the full-on charging pose.

Jeremy, my art director picked the charging one ( not surprisingly since it was the right answer to the assignment) sometimes I wonder why I think my off-suggestions are going to work. I KNOW they are wrong but I fall in love with the sketches and toy with the idea that they could be wonderfull pictures.


Well; for the face of the one that was approved I was inspired by a bat face and the jaw/face structure of a moray eel.

I transfered it to board and inked it and added greytones in black acrylic.

The colors for this one is, once again, a result of having done a couple of previous paintings in a more dull or muted down pallet. So with this one I wanted to go all in. What I really aimed for was to keep all black or even dark colors away from the background to make the environment seem light by strong sunlight. Also I love when the colors vibrate and comes alive without the use of value contrast but by the temperature and the color contrast. Notice how close the values of the colors are in the rock wall and yet how many different colors it consists off. That is something I have been concentrating on for the last many years. Creating interesting vibrant textures with many colors but within the same value range.

When the image was done I thought it looked too cute. the black snout made me think of Disney’s Stitch figure. So I changed it digitally before sending it off. I am very glad I did. I constantly try to drag myself out of Cute-town. This time I kind of got a few steps before they dragged me back…


If anyone have questions to technical stuff I would love to go into details; just ask?