MTG: Infuse (1994)
Early freedom
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Reaching back to my first Magic: the Gathering set, Infuse was a card that never really saw play at any time in the game. Nevertheless, of the 9 I did for that set, it was one of the ones I liked.
These days, Magic art descriptions can be a couple of sentences to a couple of paragraphs long. Notes about setting, page references to world-specific style guides, attitude or expressions specified, clothing notes, narrative beats and so on. Back in 1994, however….
This assignment was given to me on the phone by Art Director Sandra Everingham. We chatted about the deadlines and so on and then she just started reading down a list of card names some of which changed. I’d stop her and ask a little more about ones that sounded interesting and she’d give me any additional details. In this case, that it was blue card (the letter “B”) and that it was a spell of some kind that gave a morale boost. So that was the extent of what I had to go on. The “S” in the image above meant that I had submitted the sketch for it.
Pause to consider how little that is to go on. So, when looking at this piece now, it actually feels like it has more to do with many of my personal works than any particular game. Because in a sense, it was. This isn’t sword and sorcery as such, it’s more dreamlike, moodier.
Very little changed from the thumbnail except for tightening up the drawing. The idea of these ghostly arms touching the figure and infusing it with energy or whatever was essentially there.
In this case, I did add the unusual step of producing a color study, which I did by taking the Sharpie sketch (which I no longer have a scan of) and making a copy on my fax machine, on thermal paper. On this I hastily blotted down some color notes in acrylic. I present it with my handwritten notes on the margins (which I often trim from images here)
A couple of things to note here. First, I don’t recall going with such a heavy blue-green theme for the figure. I see green in the palm of the one hand and so I assume that these were glowing bluish arms emanating green energy, thus lighting the figure in green light. I wish I recalled why, but obviously I didn’t go that route, and this color sketch was probably precisely why I did not.
