MTG: Requiting Hex (2024)
Simplifying unpleasantness
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The original painting and preliminary study are available for direct purchase. The links are belowThe original painting can be found and purchased here. SOLDThe preliminary study can be found and purchased here. SOLD
Sometimes, there are cards within Magic that just destroy things. And the job is to portray that magic, well, destroying things. And sometimes that destroying of things is unpleasant. Nothing to be done about it!
There are quite a few unpleasant things here. First, is a type of elemental, chimera-type creature found within the world of Shadowmoor. Second, the spell being cast here is a sort of miasma of magical smoke that looks like it’s made of wiggling worms or something. Third, the elemental is being disintegrated as the miasma overtakes it.
Whew.
To begin, there was this chimera to deal with. They were to be constructed by kinda taking three creatures and colliding their anatomy.
The bird with bat wings went well together. The lower, pencil drawing was the basis of a composition that I abandoned before submitting it. It just wasn’t very good. Thankfully I had a little more time so worked up an alternate. Part of the problem was card size, and that the creature shown above was going to be too small for the disintegration aspect to read well. So I decided to close in on the scene, so much that I’d lose the spider parts, which I kinda liked just on the basis of creepy. I kept the bird and bat, and added antlers, though they admittedly fade into the background a bit. Given that the combo of things was already confusing, I was ok with this happening a little.
By portraying the miasma as three bands with an orderly diagonal, I could more clearly show one of the bands going through the creature, and since they were to be made of this spaghetti like texture, also allowed me to tame the confusion a bit through the defined shapes their overall form would take. It was a much more successful solution than the earlier one, which I’m not showing here.
In the end, the job was to tame a series of very unusual requests. It was a challenge but I was happy with how I was able to wrangle it at least into an interesting composition.
Shared with permission from WOTC, TM and © Wizards of the Coast