MTG: Cheap Ass (2003)
Early digital experiments
Please enjoy today’s public post. I hope you’ll consider joining with a paid subscription to see new posts every weekday.
Magic has produced 3.5 Un-sets, which are essentially joke sets with humorous art and humorous rules sets. I don’t really get the point of them as they don’t really mix with the standard releases. Do people really play Un-games? I don’t know.
I worked on 2.5 of them and did the work with various degrees of enthusiasm, none particularly high. When I didn’t work on the more recent release, I wasn’t sad to miss it and by then I’d probably have declined it anyway. When it comes down to it, while I have a fine sense of humor, I don’t really bring intentional silliness into my work. But, it’s also hard to say no to projects, and I didn’t want to give a diva impression at the time.
So, Cheap Ass. There are a number of donkey-themed cards in the set, and I was to illustrate one such as a kind of uptight, penny-pinching school marm.
The puckered mouth and lipstick might have been my favorite aspect of this piece, as far as I could enjoy it. As these cards break most conventions, I opted to surround the figure in the kinds of tacky badges you might see on discount or overstock endcaps at stores. But, I opted to just make these digital additions to the painted figure study. So I rendered out the figure as usual in oils.
This was the first instance of me using digital tools in my Magic illustration. It would be a little while still until my first fully digital illustration, but this serves as an interesting historical line in my career, especially since some 20-ish years later, doing fully digital pieces is not an uncommon thing for me now.
It was decided that the signs should be painted and more down-home, so as if painted on clapboard or whatever. So I painted those items separately and composited them into the final. Oddly, I don’t have the final scan with those items in place...it’s possible I let them composite the final according to my layout? This had happened once before, but I honestly don’t remember. By 2003 I was setup to do the work myself, certainly.
This is part of why I need to do Art of the Day, because all these stories get lost!