Microtech ‘Trode Set (1995)
Early wins
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After working on my first Magic set, Ice Age, I had a bit of time before working on Magic again. My next game project for Wizards of the Coast was some 3-4 months later, working on their cyberpunk-themed game Netrunner. Among the illustrations I did for the game, this painting represents an early win for me.
As I’ve written about, those first few years were me finding my bearings as an illustrator, and not often able to work to my potential. This painting was an example of me working to the level I knew I was capable of, and remains one of my favorite paintings from those early years.
In part, the close up nature of the piece to show this wearable headset (which no doubt interfaces with the user’s brain via ports) allowed for much more detail than the tiny heads I’d been painting elsewhere, particularly at a time when we were constrained by size. The other benefit was that I was working from well-shot reference material, in this case featuring a good friend of mind from high school, who introduced me to William Gibson and the genre of cyberpunk, generally. While I didn’t end up a huge fan of that genre, it made my model an obvious choice.
This was an era in which I moved extremely quickly and often only minimally referenced my work, to its detriment. The idea of finding models for the 15 or so illustrations I might have done per month at that time seemed ridiculous, especially in the era of the internet just getting going.
In any case, there were a couple of nice Netrunner pieces of the bunch, and honestly I think they were very important for my continuing to succeed as an illustrator in those early days. I was thrilled to find out a few months later that Wizards had chosen this illustration as the centerpiece of the game’s advertising, which mostly appeared in magazines at the time, running full-page ads which featured this artwork prominently. Knowing that it was chosen out of a few hundred artworks for that honor was a huge boost, and when a few months later I was asked to do a feature interview and cover to Wizards’ The Duelist magazine, which had a Netrunner focus, I knew as well that it was largely owing to this artwork.
I had a small handful of early wins of this nature in those first couple of years. Without them, I don’t know that my early work would have sustained me to the point of me sitting here, decades later, still working.
