the making of Something Old, Something New
TLDR: Paintings are Essays and stories of their own creation. This is how I Fan art. Fantasy Art is more than just dragons and wizards. I owe a lot of my integrity to the work of Wizards of the Coast.
If you don’t want to read it, thanks for being an audience, if you like this piece as much as I do, maybe consider buying a print HERE
So now and then, very rarely in recent times, you make the piece you are most proud of, what makes pieces like this, to you, so important is often they act like little essays of what’s going on in your mind captured in your visual artistic abilities.
Firstly, I only found out I was a part of the @lightgreyartgallery Gallery, Link HERE (<= CLICK IT, there are some AMAZING artworks in there and I am humbled and honored to be amongst some of them) about 20 days after I should have, I had roughly ten days to make this piece happen.
But this piece has been rattling around my head for a very long time, for multiple reasons I have wanted to paint my reimagining of Wurmcoil Engine for several months now, taking influence from Old Phyrexia moreso than it’s more smooth styles now, the old grimy exposed biomechanical monstrocities they were when they first struck fear into the multiverse of Mtg. And I have loved drawing gnarled monstrous teeth since I was like, 14 and found my first salvation from the Anime style black hole, with the work of Dave Allsop.
The piece clicked after a while of me researching angels and their less common eldritch appearance, I love angel mythology because it’s some of the first cases when Fantasy Art as we first would understand it, was born, when artists, with patronage from the church, began to capture the more mythological visuals in a realistic believable way, these were the stepping stones towards imaginative realism, and with this classical painters began adding realism to images of the Minotaur and Gorgons. Naturally tribute goes to Frazetta and his pulp colleagues for making Fantasy Art a valid genre of Art, but Angels and Demons have their seats at some of the earliest forms of what we now know as fantasy art.
In this there are many scriptures that make the ranks of angels far more than just winged humans, ranging to anthropomorphic shoggoths of wings and animals to 6 winged seraphim covered in eyes and the strange mechanical flying objects of the ophanim or thrones. In taking inspiration for these and looking up eldritch angels, finding the obvious references being made with the Eldrazi as they stretch between @bugmeyer art and the Angel Eldrazi of Shadows over Innistrad. Suddenly my speculative Vorthos fired up and I couldn’t stop thinking of this simple story I wanted to tell.
So, there’s a fairly obvious storytelling theme a lot of my work recently, it’s an inevitable marriage of what I want to draw and paint from what’s inspiring me, and a drive to improve the storytelling purposes of illustration, there’s an easy way to tell a story visually and that’s through duality. Duality is simple, it’s a clear and obvious conflict presented to an audience, old vs new, mechanical vs natural, good vs evil, light vs dark or simple, Thing vs ANOTHER Thing that isn’t the first Thing: This was sort of struck on when I found the work of @gallerygerard and I was hooked, there’s a lot of pieces depicting smaller warriors facing off Balrogs or Giant Wolves and the narrative being presented is inescapable, so yeah, I wanted to be able to do that too. So this piece is definitely not the last of something like this I’ll do, I hardly think I’ve mastered the simple diorama of this at all, but this piece was definitely all because I started pushing for that. (also helps that I can make some money off designs like this because they make killer playmats.)
So before I get to Magic and it’s influence on me... I need to talk about Paint.
I am not a painter, every time I have attempted to mark a canvas or board with wet or traditional has failed horribly and I escaped to the confines and safety of digital from a young age, on the upside it’s definitely saved me a LOT of money avoiding paint, but truly, I never really have touched it all again. But then I gave a good proper look at the work of Ryan Pancoast, Steve Prescott and the Man who taught me about colour, Jesper Ejsing . I have SO much respect for their work, nothing comes close to how much a piece inspires me as seeing it in physical paint, there’s a strange sort of magic (hehe) with the bravery of what is being done with a brush to capture wholly what makes a piece unique when it’s literal material smeared, dabbed and layered on a canvas. I tried to capture this by making the design intricate and filled with visual eccentricity and natural texture, as well as using the literal shape of marks made to really push the values to try to tell a bolder narrative with this piece. I cannot list the ways I think I failed at this, but I only want to learn and keep practicing when a piece like this comes just a little close to capturing that magic. An additional mention on the artists above, the pure bravery of making work that looks so perfectly not of this world in an industry plagued by stoic realism is nothing but inspiring, I truly want to achieve as Elsing puts it: “a window looking into another world.“
Interestingly I struggle with fan art, every now and then there’s a thing I like at the time so I make something to celebrate it, I however often lose interest before making it an actually good ‘to my own standard‘. Magic allows me to still stretch my own creative wings, my own imagination being allowed to play amongst an established universe that no other Fan Art allows me to. Magic’s art direction told me it was okay to be a bit weird. It’s no secret that I aspire to work on Magic the Gathering art, to give contributions that could only come from myself and aren’t just attempts to be ‘that kid who makes art that looks like it was made by Prescott/Ejsing‘ so the eclecticism there, while attempting to learn the secrets their work holds and putting it into my work. I love the fact that through the years I’ve seen work come out of Mtg, that has truly allowed artists to put their own unique vision into a game with such a flowing world.
To follow the gushing about Mtg, this card game has had a massive effect on my development, whilst it’s definitely John Howe’s Smaug to be the piece that opened a door to me to Fantasy Art, it was also a little card called Vizzerdrix from Starter, that fully made me fall in love with Magic’s art, that made sure that one of my aspirations would be to make art alongside pieces like it. Once I’d grown up a bit Magic’s art and art direction allowed me to discover artists, some already mentioned, that would show me how it’s done: Throughout my portfolio in the past I have made little attempts at the sharp lighting and texture of a Tyler Jacobson facet or the bold journey of colour through an Ejsing and the brave shape of a Raymond Swanland .
And I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that Magic has taught me both a love of games and the value in just going outside and meeting someone new, and having a conversation with someone over our mutual love of slinging spells, beating people’s faces in with an array of creatures and the elegant game of drawing and flopping cards.
I love that whilst I needed it to be there for me, Magic was, from the fact that when I’ve been at my lowest darkest moments, I could go out and enjoy playing Magic with someone, to the marvelous time of becoming more aware of challenging myself with more diversity to my characters and worlds, Magic’s art and story seemed to agree. Thank you Magic.
So here’s this piece, what I see as my way to pay tribute to 25 years (that’s almost my age) of Magic the Gathering, it’s only a whisper of it’s effect and influence on me whilst I am hoping it feels as awesome a piece as I feel it is right at this moment.
This month is insanity for me, my participation in the Gallery is a true first, my partially developed tabletop game Disastles is making massive progress over on Kickstarter (please take a look at that HERE) and that product and the relationships it’s making are laying the groundwork for something to be announced in the near future which is literally a career moment for me. I needed to just talk about this exact moment in time and I am so happy that I have this piece that’s just a small snippet of my life where a lot is going on, as in every life, and it’s just (as Fantasy Art almost always is) a lot more than a monster fighting another monster.
Thanks for reading if you did
I tried to share a lot of my influences both for context but especially because if you like art, you owe it to yourself to know some of these names and see their work, I owe so much to them myself
