Magic the Gathering – Evidence Examiner

And just like that, I received the proofs for Evidence Examiner, one of the cards I made for Magic the Gathering Murders at Karlov Manor.

The set has been released, and it’s always a huge privilege being featured among such amazing artists.

Evidence Examiner is a Magic the Gathering Multicolored Card, which means it’s printed in a golden frame, by far my favourite.
It’s awesome, it glitters:)

I also received the proofs for my previous card belonging to the same set, Magnifying Glass.

It’s an artifact, so the border doesn’t glitter, but still.

Once again, I managed not to delete the sketches.

This first one was rejected for obvious reasons, as the Evidence Examiner’s face wasn’t visible. That’s too bad, as I thought the perspective was a bit more unusual. But yes, I agree it made less sense than the one we picked.

In the second sketch I made a mistake, as I thought the Examiner were a male. Now that I think of it I’m not sure the brief specified their gender, but I eventually had to make another version with the final face.

There was also a big change I had to make at the palette after I had started rendering.

Evidence Examiner is multicolored green-blue, and the Art Director felt like the palette of the initial rough (on the left) was a bit too warm for its purpose.
In the final version, on the right, I made the background a lot colder, which together with the green drapes in the foreground made the category of the card much clearer.

You might notice that in the final version I also added some more fins to the Merfolk Detective, which in the first draft was a bit too light in that department.

Thanks again to AD Deborah Garcia for the flawless direction. Once again, everything went super smooth and it was a pleasure working with her.

by Paolo Puggioni

Magic the Gathering – Magnifying Glass

Magnifying Glass is one of the Illustrations I made for Magic the Gathering.
It’s part of the Murders at Karlov Manor set, that will be released on the 9th of February.

The set isn’t out yet, but since the cards are already being teased I’m allowed to show it around.
Wizards of the Coast just let me know that the artists’ proof are about to be shipped, so I can’t wait to see how the print turned out!
In the meantime, here’s the digital version.

Since lately I’ve been super diligent, I have even kept the sketches.

Since I haven’t seen the set yet, and art briefs don’t usually include gameplay or cards stats, the information I have about Murders at karlov Manor are mostly from the MTG Wiki:

“Murders at Karlov Manor is a top-down designed murder mystery set, featuring the tropes of the genre. Murders and mysteries are woven into the game itself. Play detective as you collect evidence, don disguises and identify suspects to decipher the deadly murder mystery at the heart of Ravnica”.

“This set is the first to feature 15-card Play Boosters that replace both Draft Boosters and Set Boosters (one card being a marketing card or art card). Because of the decrease in common cards in a pack, the total amount of common cards in a given set is also going down. R&D lowered the number of commons from 101 to 80 (and increased uncommons from 80 to 100). The rare surveil lands are put in the “wild card” slot of the boosters rather than taking the “rare” slot”.

As it happens, Magnifying Glass was an artifact already present in the game, Illustrated by Dan Scott for Shadows Over Innistrad I believe in 2016.

Anyway, thanks to Art Director Deborah Garcia for the super smooth and pleasant direction.

As usual, the production times for Magic the Gathering cards are super long. I delivered the final illustration on the 12th of November 2022 and the set is coming out just now.

I have to confess I almost forgot I made this. Checking in my Archived Work folder I also realized that there are five other cards that I made about that time that haven’t been released yet, so I hope I’ll be able to post them soon!

by Paolo Puggioni

Magic the Gathering – The Knight

The Knight is one of the cards I made for Magic the Gathering Commanders Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate.

When Art Director Dawn Murin sent me the brief and I read the words “Baldur’s Gate” in the email subject I fainted a little.
I mean, not only I lived in Baldur’s Gate with my imaginary character while playing D&D. I also played the crap out of all the video games when they came out a billion years ago, to the point that I could almost draw the map of the city out of memory.

Look at this ancient beauty.

As far as the Knight goes, I was a bit troubled about the release.
Wizards of the Coast published the list of cards for the release last month, but I couldn’t see mine in it. I kind of thought it had been culled or something like that.
Then a friend at work, who is kind of a Magic the Gathering Pro, dug it up and pointed it to me.

Being it a token card is not part of the regular bunch, hence the mistery.

If you’re curious, here’s the page with all the token cards for Magic the Gathering Commanders Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate.

Anyway, here she is in all her fierce Tiefling beauty.

The Knight is a member of the Order of the Flaming Fist, patrolling the riverside on her Eriskay pony.

Talking about the process, the same friend asked me if I had worked on her face separately and then moved it into place, which obviously I didn’t.

But that made me realize that her face might look a bit overworked compared to the rest, which it probably is.

I have to confess that the things I always struggle with the most in a painting are faces. I often over-compensate by spending a lot of time on them compared to most of the rest, which often results in them being more detailed and polished than the overall composition.

I think that from now on I’ll try and do the same number of passes in all elements of the picture and see if that improve things. Thanks Levy:)
Upside of going to the office: people talk.

Since I’m a diligent boy, I kept the sketches.

There’s still a whole bunch of cards that I made that haven’t been released yet, this one was finished more than a year ago!
However, together with the ones already out it starts to look like a line-up:)

Also, and this a huge thing for me, I kind of graduated to the standard game, so this time I got the printed proofs, and they look awesome.

Fun fact. This was the first time I had worked with AD Dawn Murin. I received the brief while I was already working on two other cards, and the moment I accepted it I scheduled the time on my planner and took it off my mind, as it was weeks ahead.

Then one day I came across the art order again and “OMG I MISREAD THE DEADLINE DATE! IT’S TOMORROW! I HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED”

So I wrote a super apologetic – and admittedly panicked – email that sounded like “I MISREAD THE DEADLINE I’M SO SORRY CAN I HAVE MORE TIME?”, to which I was replied something along the lines of “dude chill, you are misreading it now, it’s still two months ahead”.

“Oh, ok… well that was me, nice to meet you then:)”

Everything ended well and nothing was damaged aside form my self respect.

By the way, if anyone wants signed proofs drop me an email.

by Paolo Puggioni

Magic the Gathering – Electrostatic Blast

I’m super happy of finally being able to post Electrostatic Blast, the second card I made for Magic the Gathering, which this time is set in Innistrad.

The first card I made, Glenn the Voice of Calm, was indeed for Magic the Gathering, but being it a license for The Walking Dead by AMC it kind of left me with the itch to work on the traditional setting.

This itch remained unscratched for almost a year. I had finished working on Glenn around February 2020 and never did anything else for Wizards of the Coast for the rest of the year.
My thought (and fear!) at the time was that Glenn would have been my only contribution to the franchise I’ve loved since the 90s.

Then at the beginning of 2021 I was contacted by Art Director Crystal Chang, with whom I already had the chance to work on Star Wars for Fantasy Flight Games.

She asked me if I was interested to draw Electrostatic Blast (uh, yes?), and from then on I had the huge pleasure of working steadily on Innistrad for the rest of the year.

Anyway, here it is.

For those unfamiliar with Innistrad, the setting is fairly dark and Gothic, with blood and Vampires and Werewolves, so don’t be surprised if the moods and colours reflect that.

In general I’m more comfortable with a slightly broader palette and definitely more saturation, but for Innistrad that’s the look that works.

Luckily there was plenty of reference made available by Wizards of the Coast, so I had an easy time remaining consistent with the visual language of the setting.

The one thing I LOVE about working for Wizards of the Coast (a part from, you know, working for Wizards of the Coast), is that for every assignment we are provided with a big chunky manual with all the information an artist would need. Background story, setting description, characters, environments and all that.

Compared to a brief I had once for another project, “there’s a castle in the background and a knight in heroic pose in the foreground”, this was like Christmas.

Anyway, since I had suffered some catastrophic loss of data early this year, for this assignment I made several incremental saves just to be on the safe side. Which gave me the chance to make this short video out of all the WIPs.

While re-watching it I realized that early in the process I had lit several windows of the surrounding buildings with a warm light. I later changed my mind and thought that they were taking too much attention away from the focus of the image, so I got rid of them in the final version.

So yes, I didn’t just forget to activate a layer:)

Anyway, this is how Electrostatic Blast looks like.

You can check it together with the other cards of its set at Alchemy:Innistrad here.

As you might notice, in that set there’s another card I made for this round of Innistrad illustrations (a Mythic, no less!), but I’ll be able to post it only next week.

by Paolo Puggioni

Magic the Gathering – Glenn, the Voice of Calm

Glenn the Voice of Calm, the first card I’ve made for Magic the Gathering and my first work for Wizards of the Coast, makes me officially an MTG illustrator, which is pretty cool if you ask me.

I’ve wanted to work for them for at least 20 years, so you can imagine how happy I was when one of their Art Directors got in touch with me out of the blue asking if I was free.

Only an iron will and a strong professionalism prevented me to reply “For you? Fuck yes!”.
It was implied though, and after a few months and a surprisingly smooth and painless round of sketches-feedback-roughs-finals we came up with this.

Now, you may ask how a character from the show The Walking Dead fits into the traditionally Fantasy setting of Magic the Gathering.

The short answer is, I don’t know. I used to be an avid Magic the Gathering player back in the ’90s, but I stopped following its development (other than its artwork) a long time ago to save my sanity.

I have to confess I didn’t even ask, I just wanted to work for Wizards of the Coast!

I can only say that it was huge fun. The Art Director was great, I had to re-watch the first seasons of the Walking Dead, I had to take an insane amount of screenshots of Zombies as a reference, and that I had the pleasure of painting Glenn, who happened to be my favorite character from the show.

I was also chuffed to learn that apparently the portrait I made was directly approved by Steven Yeun, who played the character in the series!

For once, I also happen to have saved some of the sketches.
They’re pretty much variations of poses.
The shot had to be frontal, with no weird perspectives and with a bunch of Zombies in the background.

There wasn’t much room for variations, really.

Now, once one of the sketches was approved (after a few tweaks to zoom the character in) I made a couple of variations for the lighting.

The first one I made, shown below, had Glenn’s face slightly in the shadow, which I thought would have been an original way of distancing from the usual “let’s put a light in the point of interest to show what’s important in the canvas”.

I was actually pretty happy with it, I thought it was a great idea! As it happens, the Art Director wouldn’t have it so I ended up adding more saturation and brightness on and around Glenn’s face, which is what you see in the final image.

To be honest, I don’t know what I was thinking, that’s what Art Directors are for:) I mean, look at them side by side.

The first thing you think of in the first image is “nice, a big bright orange backpack. Oh and is that a face up there?”. So in hindsight I’m glad someone else talked me out of it.

Anyway, this is now Glenn the Voice of Calm, forever in the Wizards of the Coast records. I don’t have other Magic the Gatherings cards lined up so far this year, if there will be more in the future this is where I’ll brag about it first.

by Paolo Puggioni