L5R: Naga Bushi (1995)
Acrylic on fax paper?
The early years of the card game revolution, following on the heels of Magic: the Gathering’s breakthrough success, were a fun time. Rival games—most doomed to failure, and you knew it, though it was hard to say which might last longer than others—filled almost every genre niche, in an effort to differentiate themselves, and the number of things you could with card-based games was quickly explored with all sorts of different mechanics and strategies.
It was a fun time to start illustrating, and because the work was mostly small, allowed for a lot of learning, experimentation, and meant that nothing felt too precious. For better or worse.
Probably my favorite of the rival games by other publishers was Legend of the Five Rings, a westernized-take on Japanese samurai imagery, full of fantasy nonsense loosely based on imagery from Japanese mythology.
Naga Bushi was painted for the inaugural set, one of 11 pieces I did, maybe half of which were above the line of decent. I’d count this among them. By turning this character away, I didn’t have to consider whether his face might still be reptilian, or transition to fully human. I could have used the men-yoroi facial that mask samurai wore with their helmets to obscure it further, I suppose.
