"Dawn's Truce" Card for Magic

Recently, several of my Magic the Gathering cards were released! I have secretly been working on the Bloomburrow project for Magic for almost a year now, and it has been KILLING me not to be able to share them. It has been such a great experience working on this one! So today, I'm going to start sharing these cards with you here, as well as my traditional drawings and some behind-the-scenes commentary on their creation process.

THE CONCEPT ART:  

In this redacted comp, you can see 2 of these options I provided to the art director. When I sent it in I added a lot of notes to try and explain some of my thoughts on it.

They came back with some notes requesting that we combine these 2 ideas, using Mabel (the mouse and egg) from (A), and the owl with open wings from (B). They also wanted to keep the moon out of the scene since the moon cycles are shown so prominently on the owl.

After making these adjustments, I sent in a color comp to give a better sense of the colors I was planning on. The only note they sent back here was to enhance all the magical elements on the owl, play up the mouse's sword, and add a pattern to the egg.

THE DRAWING:

Once this was approved, I did a traditional pencil drawing on Strathmore Bristol and sent this back in to the client for their approval before moving on to color.

THE PAINTING:

I painted this in a bit of a panic on a fairly tight schedule (I had several other cards going at the same time). Because of this, I chose to work digitally in Photoshop, using the cycle method I have described in the Tutorials tier from the previous year, using my color comp as a guide.

Now, as an aside: We as a community are on a traditional media arc right now, and part of that is me refusing to promote Adobe products any longer, and taking a looong break from digital painting. So this may sound like an inconsistency, but I need to be clear that I painted most of these in 2023, back when I still very much enjoyed working with Adobe, before the whole Gen-AI debacle. All of my new cards since then have been painted traditionally, and I will be sharing those too once they get released!

A note on originals: On that note, I will be launching a store, (or possibly auctioning) many of the originals, and possibly some of the cards, but all of that will likely happen next month.