The Making of: Brutal Expulsion

Hey guys!

Story time, it think it is valuable in some way because I learned a lot in the making of this piece and I hope you do too as we go through the making of the art for Brutal Expulsion, for Magic: the gathering´s battle for Zendikar.

Before all of this, we recieved an e-mail from the art directors with an image by Jason Rainville, pretty much saying that's how they wanted the Eldrazi to feel like. It was a good piece, it was a great piece, it was genius.

This is the image from Jason's facebook, I was mesmerized with everything, how he played out the values, the light, the creature looked so believable, and don't get me started on the water. This was one of my peeps, it was expected of me to handle the same quality, at least I expected myself to do so. By this point I was content with my work so far but not quite happy and wasn't certaily at the level I wanted to be. I have to clarify that this was a year ago and I've been aplying the same thought ever since, so do expect much better work from me a year from now. (this is also my theory of why Jason is never satisfied with his stuff, JK Jason). Moving on.

Out of the three sketches this was the one approved by Dawn Murin, art director who worked with me in this piece. I was confident up until this point, while dissecting Jason's piece it was quite clear how he got the water to look so good and the sandy stuff, the corruption behind was pretty simple, all were elements you could easily photograph, but where did he get the reference for the dude is still a mistery (now I know he has an enormous amount of practice and knows where the light will bounce off things without having to look at reference). I had a less humanoid looking creature and getting a friend to pose wasn't going to cut it this time, so, I built my own ref. I have no idea how to model in 3D, and I did not have the time to learn before deadline, but I do however know how to model in clay and sculpt, so I did.

(ignore thar blurry thing on the corner)

So there is the model staged all nice and pretty, a few brushstrokes later and some notes from the AD it ended up looking like this. I'm trully grateful with the whole WotC team for their work, they really outdid themselves in BFZ,

Until next time!

- V