Fantasy Illustration Blog by Cynthia Sheppard: What does a Magic art director do?

Saturday, May 13, 2017

What does a Magic art director do?

Last week I learned I’ve been nominated for a Chesley award for Best Art Director… it was a very cool thing to find out, but also a surprise, given that I rarely talk about art directing and most of what I do is relatively invisible unless I'm directly working with you.

To set the stage, I joined Wizards of the Coast in February 2015. All our work is top secret for a year or more until it’s made public, so run the math on my just-over-2-year career, and you realize that a good chunk of the stuff I've worked on is still necessarily shrouded in mystery. The nature of the job makes it difficult to talk about anything current without being annoyingly vague, and by the time I can talk about something it feels like ancient history to me...

...But in the wake of a Chesley nomination, I felt like breaking the silence and dusting off my lapsed Blogger account. This isn’t a solicitation for votes (the polls close tomorrow and I assume most folks have already voted), but it's a convenient excuse to provide some visibility and insight into what Magic R&D art directors like me do.

Our tiny domain.

I use art directors plural because there are currently four of us in Magic R&D.

A few years ago it was Jeremy Jarvis doing all of it solo, until veteran Sr. AD Dawn Murin came to the team, then Mark Winters, myself, and most recently Kieran Yanner. Jeremy has since been promoted to Franchise Creative Director and moved desks to a different floor of the building (we miss him) and all his old responsibilities, plus some new responsibilities, have transferred to us.

We each do slight variations on the same job, so I'll be speaking mainly from my own experiences as a Sr. Art Director.

COMMISSIONING ART

Magic: The Gathering is an analog card game that requires at least one piece of art for every card, so working with freelance illustrators to make that art is the steady drumbeat behind a Magic art director’s day.

We work in six week cycles, beginning with reviewing card concepts and collaborating with the creative team writers (who hone the concepts and write the actual words that become the art descriptions) to find the best pictures to fit a card's rules. Each image is crafted to tell the player something about what the card does from its tiny art box across the table, and show off the setting and flavor. Does the card have Flying? The art might need wings... What color is it? If it's a creature, what is its power and toughness? What kind of tokens does this spell make? Is there a specific visual cue tied to a mechanic?

The art is as much a gameplay communication aid as it is fun to look at, and we consider all of that during commissioning.

Once the concepts are written and formalized into art descriptions, we hand-select from over 150 artists for each assignment, taking into account everything from the individual artist’s style and problem-solving strengths, to their availability, to conversations we’ve had with them about what they're excited about painting.

We follow the assignments through a rigorous feedback process, reviewing incoming sketches and finals constantly. Since the creative team is a highly collaborative organism, we get multiple sets of eyes on the art and synthesize feedback from within our team before reaching out to the artists. Feedback is our tool for making sure each illustration fits the needs of the card, is well-executed, and stays consistent within the context of the setting.

An elegant weapon.

In 2016, I commissioned a total of 578 unique pieces of card art for Magic.

I don’t think I need to say it, but that is a lot of art. And with 3 of us splitting up the commissioning in 2016, that paints a decent picture of the volume of illustrations that make up a year’s worth of Magic cards.

WORLDBUILDING

In the wake of Jeremy leaving the Sr. Art Director role, we stepped up and started doing the worldbuilding that the cards depend on, too. This is one of my favorite parts of the job.

We currently visit two worlds (planes in Magic parlance) per year in our main set block releases. To get a deeper look into what “two worlds a year” means, you should pause reading this and go watch the GDC talk Jeremy did earlier this year on how we do it- for the sake of brevity I won't rehash that speech, but it's really worth a listen if you're interested in our process.

Every world has an art lead, and that role is now traded back and forth between the art directors (Mark art-leads a world, I take the next, and so on). For reference, you'll see the results of the first world I art directed this fall.

After the vision is captured by the team, the lead AD is responsible for art directing the world guide- a giant tome filled with hundreds of environment, character, creature and motif concept illustrations, plus text that gives artists and writers a holistic capture of the world. It's what our art descriptions refer back to often as a means of keeping visual and tonal consistency across a card set when a hundred different hands are touching the final product.

Actual pile of concept art

Along with our in-house concept artists, we bring in illustrators from around the globe for three week events called “concept pushes” to help generate all that concept art. The art lead kicks off the push by making and giving a detailed presentation about the world vision, and we work closely with the artists and whole creative team in reviews throughout.

We also try to have fun and… you know… make sure they get fed and see outside the building.

Actual artists, actually outside.

CONCEPT ART

3/4 of the current Magic ADs started as card illustrators (including me) and we've been artists on some of those worldbuilding concept pushes ourselves. My biggest contributions as a concept artist were for Kaladesh, our 2016 Fall release. Under Jeremy’s direction at the time, I designed things like aether pipes, some of the filigree* gears that you see throughout the setting, and a significant portion of the look of elves and dwarves on the plane. Here’s a Kaladesh dragon I concepted, and how it relates to finished works of art on cards:

*I make no apologies for the filigree.

ADs still contribute concept art occasionally, when needed outside of the concept pushes.

OUTREACH

The most visible part of many ADs’ jobs is scouting for talent at conventions and other events. We’re extremely proud to get to work with some of the best of the best illustrators in the world, and we have no shortage of assignments for new folks who meet our high quality bar and aesthetic. So while it's a big time spend, it’s also a special treat to get to travel, meet artists and review portfolios in person. In 2016 we traveled to SDCC and GenCon, and this June I’m excitedly looking forward to visiting the Illustration Master Class in Amherst, MA as a guest instructor.

I had an awesome visit with NCAD students on Wednesday.

COLLABORATION

We work directly with folks all over the building, and are always on call to sign off on things or answer questions about art and worldbuilding from Design, Editing, Imaging, Brand, and executives. We like to say we have a culture of collaboration. What that means is, instead of giving handoffs or saying a bunch of words at people and walking away, we sit down around a table with one another. Quite often.

I thought a visual would help, so I'll let this image abstractly illustrate what my typical meeting schedule looks like:

Rectangle = a week. Blue = meetings.

(In all fairness, these meetings are important and help us get things done).

MISCELLANEA

Apart from the "normal" paces of the job, other things ranging from office-y to specialized tasks come up all the time, and we activate. Some of those things include:

Making Powerpoint presentations (with fancy animations and drop shadows and stuff)
Hand-fixing oil paintings that were damaged in shipping
Documenting our processes & recording meeting notes
Writing short essays (or really long emails that have a thesis statement)
Playtesting future card sets and giving playtest feedback
Picking artists up from the airport
Knowing about various printing methods
"Paperwork"
Remembering our ever-changing placeholder names for things (I am bad at this one.)

KNOWLEDGE OF THE BRAND

This is less tangible, but important. Magic has a set of standards and an aesthetic range that makes it its own unique thing, and knowing what’s important to capture in our images, worlds, and characters becomes part of our instinctual and emotional makeup as art directors.

Knowing what makes Magic Magic is obviously critical for card art, but it also extends to our IP outside the card game. An example of exercising this muscle was when I recently worked on a Magic skin pack with the folks over at Minecraft and our brand team. I got to be a liaison to their in-house artists and art directors and talk with them about what features of our characters are most important to capture when they’re just a few pixels wide.

New meaning of "block release..."

I’m also a long-standing Minecraft goob, so it was insanely fun to help bridge the gap between two of my biggest nerd-doms. Kudos to the Minecraft team, they did an amazing job.

IN SUMMARY

That's the basics. I omitted a lot for the sake of brevity and confidentiality, but what I hope you take away is that there's more to it than saying 'yes' and 'no' or waving a red pen around- Magic and its art are in the hands of people who care deeply about it. I don’t think any of us would do this job if we weren’t passionate about the art, or collaborating to make the things we make.

I mentioned only a slice of what I've worked on is public, so I’ll finish out this post by celebrating some of my personal favorites among the illustrations I've commissioned so far. You didn't think I was going to leave without sharing art, did you?

Eldritch Moon: