MTG: Fell the Pheasant (2018)
Fitting it all in
Fell the Pheasant signed Artist’s Proof card is available for purchase here.
A pheasant hunt is a typical enough scene in art history, so to be assigned one for Magic: the Gathering’s Throne of Eldrane, which remixes fairy tales and classical fantasy tropes, wasn’t too unexpected.
One issue right off the bat was that the description called for a few riders returning from a hunt, including their hunting dogs. Now, perhaps that whole aspect of things is distasteful to some. For me, it was more a compositional issue: Magic cards are small, and though the print quality is usually really good, and has improved significantly over the years, squeezing that stuff into a small art box is a challenge. I considered cropping in, which is a fairly standard solution to increase the legibility of figures. But I also liked the idea of showing the scene as such, rather than have it be a character-based illustration.
