MTG: Fellwar Stone (2022)
The whole story
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I learned how to play Magic in early 1994, as I geared up to hopefully meeting an Art Director and showing my work, which eventual meeting led to where I am now.
This means I still played a lot of casual Magic when 4th Edition came out a year later. Thus, I have fond memories of cards from that set in particular, including Quinton Hoover’s original illustration for, “Fellwar Stone.” Quinton was an amazing figurative artist, so Stone was not among his best works, let’s be honest, just on the basis of opportunity for him to do something awesome. I sympathize, having had many assignments like that as well over the years.
Mind you, I didn’t have Fellwar in any of my decks, I ran a discard deck in those days, mostly. I don’t play a lot of Magic these days, so I kinda lost track of this card’s history until I was assigned to re-paint it. Turns out it has seen about as many reprints with John Avon’s excellent revision of the image, which takes that chunk of rock and puts it in the hands of someone.
My version pulls the camera out a bit further still, showing the mining of a vein of Fellwar Stone. I was kinda glad to not have to paint another chunk of rock in someone’s hands—Avon’s version is the definitive version of that kind of depiction. I was also assigned a borderless vertical version—a format I really enjoy as a break from Magic’s usual horiztontal format. But this also means that my version would likely be a special treatment version only in this set, and Avon’s will probably be the one reprinted going forward (unless they commission a new “standard” version later). It’s always nice to have art get reprinted over many years, but I also like having contributed to a number of these special border card treatments, since they do become a bit sought after due to their relative rarity and just cool factor.
I was pretty happy with my composition, after playing with other ideas including having some miners pushing a minecart loaded with Fellwar. Art Director Deborah Garcia also liked it, approving it but showing me a much tighter proposed crop from the one I’d envisioned. We chatted a bit about it, and I think there is just that thing Magic does where for artifacts, they want the card to be more obviously about the artifact than any figure holding or using it. Early days, as in Hoover’s depiction, that often meant just showing the thing. These days there is a bit more flexibility, but I suppose not as much as I was proposing.
Despite her enthusiasm for the image, this is the place where normally I might have stopped, re-concepted and resubmitted a new image, unbidden (even though it was approved). Because the cropped image is not a composition of my choosing, and I would have arranged the elements differently or just gone in a different direction if I had to crop in that close. However, that period of my life was stretched incredibly thin and I simply did not have the time to start over. Plus, I did like it.
So, I ran with it, deciding to paint the image as I conceived it and submit it. They would be free to crop as they pleased, but I also hoped to give them my crop in the final file so they could reconsider. Turns out, they were quite content with their choice. Obviously I liked my version more, but when I saw the card finally previewed, after a bit more than a year since I’d last really looked at the art, I still liked it as an image.
