MTG: Step Through (2020)

The local beach

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One thing my wife has had to kind of accept over time is that whenever we travel somewhere, I’m always taking pictures of random things. This was a greater annoyance back in the day when we would travel with rolls of film, and upon developing them there were all these pictures of tree trunks or rocks or skies or textures. But I’m still frequently falling behind on walks or pausing us at random things, to take photos of whatever.

Step Through (2020) 16x20” oil on panel

But over time, that builds up a library of references to pull from and is a necessary part of representational illustration that I imagine most of my colleagues also still do, even with internet image search being there.

Preliminary study (2020) 6x8” pencil and acrylic on toned paper. This was a thinner paper than I use now for these, you can see it buckling around the edges in the scan.

So it was that a few years before painting this, I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz with my wife’s family. We went on a couple of walks along some more quiet beaches and I happily stopped to snap photos of coasts, waves, hermit crabs, whatever. Incidentally, this is the second time I’ve used reference from Santa Cruz in a Magic painting. I did grow up in San Jose, so it being the local beach maybe makes that less surprising.

Submission study, digital over preliminary study. You can see the figure has changed and the crystals have been further developed.

So when I was asked to illustrate these doors sort of hovering over a seaside scene, I knew just where to go. Things like the sparse bubbly foam of a receding wave: these are details that I just wouldn’t be able to recall without referencing. As much as artists try to build up mental references so they can draw and paint spontaneously, or so they can extrapolate detail, the world always offers more and more layers of reality that one can add.

In-progress

It was specified that this figure stepping out of one of the doors be as indistinct as possible, and that presented an interesting challenge to me as well, to haze out enough from the bright light emanating from that door, while still being visually satisfying.

There was a bit of Stephen King’s, “The Drawing of the Three,” in my mind, certainly, as I worked on this.

In-progress. You can see the figure and door glow was not in yet, and the crystals are being painted into the background.

Step Through appeared in the Modern Horizons 2 expansion of Magic: the Gathering