MTG: Ertai (1997)
Larger for the sake of larger
March of 1997. I’d been working on Magic for a couple of years. I was 22 years old. Still working out of the extra room in my parents’ house that was my studio from 1991-1998 in South San Jose, starting in college and until I got married and moved out in ‘98. I felt generally in the swing of things, work-wise. I was still painting in Acrylic paint, which I’d started with in high school. I had a CO2 tank and an airbrush at the ready, which I used sometimes more, sometimes less, a little on this piece.
Ertai was going to be part of an odd format of oversized cards, each of which would feature a prominent character in the Rath Cycle/Weatherlight story. These cards were about 3x5” versus the standard ~2.5x3.5”. I was asked to paint Ertai. I think as a result of knowing that it would be printed larger than usual, I slowed down a bit. I also decided to work a bit bigger than usual. To that point, my average Magic paintings were 8x10” or smaller, though I was already making forays into painting card art larger: Rashida Scalebane (1996) was 16x20”, for instance. I think whenever the piece was a bit more character-based and/or seemed iconic in some sense, I’d slow down and stretch out a bit. In both Ertai and Rashida, I also opted for vertical format paintings. I knew of course that large portions of the art would never see print, but I liked the idea of painting a bit larger for me. This kind of decision-making went into pieces that I slowed down for--I just said that there was a “for me” aspect to some pieces more than others. That dichotomy was stronger back then than now, but I think in part because of the rather indiscriminate rate at which I accepted work in those days, I found myself working on projects that weren’t aesthetically interesting to me more often. I often sped through those (again, unwisely), rather than turn them down, though I eventually felt confident enough to do so over time.
