Illustration of the Week #4: MtG: Even the Odds WIP

I'll admit I've been a little lazy lately and I've mostly been reposting older work. This one's from a the Illustration of the Week challenge on conceptart.org a few weeks back.  We were tasked to reimagine a Magic:The Gathering card called "Even the Odds":

Action: This spell "calls for reinforcements" when you're up against the ropes, in the form of three soldiers. How to represent this is up to you. One idea is to show a fallen soldier whose sword, helm, and shield have fallen onto the ground around him. The armaments reflect the fallen soldier's form, and those reflections have magically come to life and are emerging from the armaments, stepping foot into the real world.

Focus: The arriving reinforcements

Mood: the tide has turned

I really wanted to work on and finish this challenge since one of my end goals is to paint an M:TG card.  I toyed around with it a lot, even experimenting with what I think is a cool framing device for the central character using the bodies and swords of the ghostly reinforcement soldier (see the red outline).  Unfortunately the way I composed the piece doesn't really work very well when shrunk to the size of a magic card.  I was too disheartened to continue the piece, especially since the deadline was so close, so it's another one of those artworks that I've abandoned.  I may go back to it sometime, but I'll likely just try to redo the whole thing instead.

I could just pick out one of the ghostly knight to complete as a rendering exercise, since I kind of like how they turned out, especially the chainmail of the knight on the left. 


I actually am working on something new right now, which I'm going to go more in depth on in my next post.  One of Aissa's friends is releasing an EP and asked some of her artist friends to contribute artwork for it.  I was assigned the back cover, and that's something I've been working on little by little over the past week.  I learned a lot just trying to get the composition right for that, so it's something I'm keen to share with everyone else.


Update: I apologize for the oddness in this post, with regards to the size of the text.  In Blogger's editing mode everything looks fine but when it gets published it's all wonky and I'm too lazy/stupid to fix it.