MTG: Stern Proctor (1998)
And That Time I Recreated It
Today’s post is part of a free preview of the daily post. Most daily posts will be for paid subscribers as we roll along. I hope you’ll consider joining with a paid subscription to see new posts every weekday.
In more recent years, I frequently take 2, 3 at most, Magic illustrations per assignment wave. But early on, things were different. For my first set, Ice Age, and for Urza’s Saga just a few years later, I took nine. I can’t even conceive of that now. One reason this was more feasible was that often the illustrations were done smaller then: back during Ice Age, the sizes were actually dictated, though by this point it was known that we could scale up if we wanted, but few did very much.
The rough size of most of these early pieces being under 8x10” meant that the more things that were in the painting, the smaller those things became. These days I can’t imagine painting a scene like that portrayed here, smaller than 12x16”, but in this case, I went much smaller.
Here, our Proctor paces the classroom, where he looks to the students in the foreground, they are angelic, on their best behavior. But as soon as he’s turned his back to the other students in the back row, they become unruly and disruptive. A simple joke. On the chalkboard, on the right, you can see an object drawn, which is the same mechanism or object that is being shrunk down to a tiny scale in the card Attunement, in the same set.
Many years later, I was contacted by some service members in the military’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. They were organizing a small Magic event for players at the school, and wanted to commission me to do a custom playmat, that they would print a small number of and give to the players. They thought it would be fun to recreate this scene and have themselves inserted into the art. It was just an audacious enough idea, and the timing was good, that I took them up on it.
I said that to do this I would need to have photos of the players to work with, preferably in uniform (as that’s what was requested), positioned in their places. Essentially, that they should act out the scene singly or in groups, and photograph it from the perspective of the viewer in the card. They did that perfectly, and included two others not in uniform essentially locked out of class, looking in. Using materials they provided, I created a black-and-white image for them (because color would not have been feasible here).
A couple of interesting things include just the quality jump in this casual re-creation versus the original. Certainly even then I was capable of better drawing, but often did not have time or recourse to setting up photoshoots, so often the pieces were just simpler and more naive owing to working unreferenced, and small. And, as mentioned, the size increase over the original, which allowed for sufficient detail.
In any case, this is a piece that you are unlikely to ever have seen outside that one-time event, or if you happen to have played against any of them elsewhere. I myself have only seen the mat in person once or twice perhaps, when a player brought one for me to sign.
Lastly, with Artist Proof commissions, I often draw something related on the back if there is no request otherwise. So it was that I drew this Stern Proctor, after a photo of Bertrand Russell.
Really cool to read about (and listen to) the background on this card! It was great meeting you in 2023 to get the sketch on the Stern Proctor :) I have my fingers crossed that you have some new art in the upcoming Secrets of Strixhaven set.
So much cool detail, thanks for the background on this card. Loved the story about the playmat too!