Pilfer Spell

"Pilfer Spell"
aka "dear MtG ADs, please hire me"

A fake Magic card illustration created for my MtG portfolio. I even wrote my fake brief for this! The goal was to depict a complex scene with multiple things going on, not just one character or prop, while still maintaining the strong hierarchy of readability of MtG cards. First the smiling, flying Lorehold student, then the magic book she just stole from the Quandrix library, then the Quandrix students who aim about as well as Stormtroopers here -- in their defense, they're trying not to harm the thief, so she's not in any real danger and she knows it.

Creating a setting-specific scene was tricky without access to the world guide: since I didn't know which design decisions were the most important to depict certain factions' identities (in this case, Strixhaven students of Lorehold and Quandrix), there was a lot of reverse-engineering going on. Plus a lot of extrapolation: the scene is set near the base of one of the huge towers on the Quandrix campus, but what they're made of or used for isn't clear from the official art. So I made up the details, from the white tree trunk-like architecture combining organic and cold, mathematical shapes to the book shelves barely visible between these columns... And that's just one of the many many things I had to figure out!

Huge thanks to Cynthia Sheppard for her feedback and to Nil for the cool title, btw :)