MTG: Pacifism (1998)
Where Magic and Netrunner meet
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A recurring theme here about my first few years as an illustrator has been the irregular quality of the work in those first years. Sure, an artist is their own worst critic, and sure I started younger than I maybe should have—a bit half-baked, perhaps. But in the end you still have to reckon with your choices.
One way I have reckoned with those choices has been through destruction, where I later come back and shred the board and toss it. That’s not an unusual method, it’s tried-and-true and there are many illustrators who’ve done the same.
But eventually I settled on re-use. Particularly with pieces done in acrylic, I’d cover the painting with gesso back to white, and then paint something else over the top of it. It feels nice to redeem the board somehow.
So it was with Pacifism, for Urza’s Saga. It is itself just an ok piece for the era—I don’t love or hate it. I like the sky. But, it has the distinction of having been painted over an illustration I did for Netrunner in 1996 for the Proteus expansion. Since I do not have a good scan of Faked Hit, I’ll just go with the card here.
Pacifism is one of the few instances where I have the assignment sheet. Through most of the 90s, we’d get a contract per set and physical assignment sheets in the mail. Usually I’d toss them after I received my art back, occasionally I’d thumbnail or sketch on the back.
On the reverse of the sheet above, I drew the first version of this art, which went unused:
I don’t recall whether I sent one or both sketches in at the same time. The other version was more of a close-up, and ended up the one used:
Some handwritten notes elsewhere on the sheet of this tiny sketch indicate that I intended to have young Urza looking gaunt and tired: as he had quit war, I thought this was an appropriate detail. But since it was not so in the final, I can only surmise that I was asked not to portray him that way.
So upon approval, I gessoed over the Netrunner piece and got to work. If you were able to see the original, there is some extra texture on this one, which comes from the build up of the first painting and then the gesso over the top.
One might say that I was able to make peace with my earlier painting.