MTG: Sol Ring (2022) | Sol Ring (2024)
Ubiquitous
When I started playing Magic back in early 1994, Mark Tedin’s illustration for the first version of Sol Ring was iconic. It’s remained one of his most popular images. Over the life of the game, over 60 different illustrations have been commissioned for this card, themed every which way from pop-culture to self-referential, to parody, to high fantasy. Many have been painted, many have been digital, I think one was a bread sculpture?
In any case, I got my first opportunity to illustrate it for the Lord of the Rings Magic set. There were multiple Sol Rings in that set, each themed in different ways. Mine was themed as the Elvish version, the text of the card being written in Tolkien Elvish. It was also hard to find, and included a serialized version of 300 which go for a lot of money.
In that case, the ring was to have the image of a white tree in it with only a couple of sprouting leaves. The Elvish Ring was to be hovering over Galadriel’s hand. It’s a literal ring, which is in-theme for the story.
For the Marvel Superheroes set, I was asked to illustrate it again. In this case, the ring was to be a gold necklace around T’Challa’s neck. It is a magical artifact here, so should look magical.
I was torn up not being able to show more of Black Panther in the image, but as we discussed in Fellwar Stone, there is usually the intention to make Artifact cards unmistakably about the Artifact. While I was allowed to paint other images for this set, and could have painted here as well, the time was sadly eaten up as we got to this version of the image, and so I rendered it finally as a digital piece as there was no time for a painting anymore. Doubly sad! I had initially drawn out much more of T’Challa, and then played with crops, me trying again to pull the camera out just a bit more, and Wizards asking me to crop in and in. Here, the necklace seems as if it is absorbing the power of the sun behind him.
This joins just a couple of other cards where I got to re-do the same card in a wildly different manner.
As both of these are from Universes Beyond projects, I am unable to show process images or preliminary studies.
