MTG: Command Tower (2024)
A view of Shadowmoor
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The original art for Command Tower is available via auction, with a Buy it Now option, at the Facebook MTG Art Market group.
It was enjoyable getting to dip my toes back into the world of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor. I really enjoyed working on those sets back in 2006-07. They had a light fantasy, whimsical and more storybook touch, less “hardcore” than Magic had been up to that time.
Whereas back then we had four smaller sets to explore, here we had just one, so the opportunities were fewer. One thing I didn’t do in the earlier sets was anything environmental. So getting to do a version of this Commander staple was fun.
In this case, our environment was on the Shadowmoor side, a world dipped into perpetual twilight, with eclipses and eerie lighting throughout. Our Command Tower here was built within a forest of large, gnarled, bramble-like trees of sorts, itself built with the hallowed out trunks and scraps of wood laying about, by some boggarts or other. This tower was to be overlooking a bay or other body of water.
The difficulty here is you have what will amount to a tower all of 1.5” tall, in print. In some cases that other artists have done, you get imposing towers delineated by being, well, tower-like in silhouette, in the distance often. Here, I was to indicate that it was being occupied by fires and lights. But it was all going to be tiny details, regardless. A couple of my thumbnails had more of a top-down view, which would have used perspective to make the part of the tower nearer the viewer larger, but these views did not allow for the tower to look, well, towerful. And while I quite liked the top left and right corners, with the towers being pushed in the distance, the nearer rock formations tended to steal the show a bit.
In this case, I liked my thumbnail sufficiently to simply blow it up and add some detail to it digitally. I felt this translated the feel of the piece well enough to move forward, and Art Director Zack Stella approved it as shown, with some written notes I had provided to help flesh out the intent.
Shared with permission from WOTC, TM and © Wizards of the Coast