PreRelease leftovers

Here are some leftover artist proof sketches from the Innistrad prerelease. Many thanks goes to the Mana Core for hosting the event and the players for stopping by my table. They were giving away my promo card for entering the event, and I was a little surprised how few people wanted a free signature on their card! So ultimately, I had some time to sketch.

...And the rest of Innistrad

Here are my final three cards in the Innistrad set. I don't have too many things to say about these particular pieces and I don't have the full-size art yet. But while I wait for the originals to come back from Wizards, I'll share some thoughts.
Unruly Mob was my final Zorn palette (cadmium red, yellow ochre, black, white) Magic card. You can't really see him too well, but the guy with the axe is one of my favorite human characters that I have painted for Magic. I don't even know why. I just think he's cool.

In Innistrad, for every standard piece commissioned to me, there were one or two pieces where the character was breaking into or out of something. Breaking out of a window, breaking into a cottage, or in the case of Claustrophobia, out of a coffin.

I painted this one upside-down for most of the process. I was trying to figure out why it didn't look right and finally realized that I had painted his cuffs falling toward the lid of the coffin. I repainted that area to fix gravity.

For Unburial Rites, the "breaking out" theme continues with a corpse trying to break out of a crypt. There was a time last year when I wished my characters could just stay where they were.

Mythic Rare

The world of Magic: The Gathering can be a random place. Artists generally have no clue whether their art will be used on a very powerful card or a relatively weak one. Army of the Damned is the first mythic rare card I have illustrated, meaning it's the most rare and generally the most powerful kind of card. A total surprise to me.

The assignment was to illustrate the inside wall of a cottage barricaded against a horde of zombies. The importance of the card clearly had to do with the many, many zombies, but the hardest part for me was to make a cottage wall compelling. Architecture, even a rundown cottage, is difficult for me to paint. Add in tons of arms and hands and the assignment becomes a big undertaking.

I don't have a larger image of the painting because I mailed it in before I could photograph it. Honestly though, I enjoy the art more on the card than I did in person.