Magic the Gathering – Electrostatic Blast

I’m super happy of finally being able to post Electrostatic Blast, the second card I made for Magic the Gathering, which this time is set in Innistrad.

The first card I made, Glenn the Voice of Calm, was indeed for Magic the Gathering, but being it a license for The Walking Dead by AMC it kind of left me with the itch to work on the traditional setting.

This itch remained unscratched for almost a year. I had finished working on Glenn around February 2020 and never did anything else for Wizards of the Coast for the rest of the year.
My thought (and fear!) at the time was that Glenn would have been my only contribution to the franchise I’ve loved since the 90s.

Then at the beginning of 2021 I was contacted by Art Director Crystal Chang, with whom I already had the chance to work on Star Wars for Fantasy Flight Games.

She asked me if I was interested to draw Electrostatic Blast (uh, yes?), and from then on I had the huge pleasure of working steadily on Innistrad for the rest of the year.

Anyway, here it is.

For those unfamiliar with Innistrad, the setting is fairly dark and Gothic, with blood and Vampires and Werewolves, so don’t be surprised if the moods and colours reflect that.

In general I’m more comfortable with a slightly broader palette and definitely more saturation, but for Innistrad that’s the look that works.

Luckily there was plenty of reference made available by Wizards of the Coast, so I had an easy time remaining consistent with the visual language of the setting.

The one thing I LOVE about working for Wizards of the Coast (a part from, you know, working for Wizards of the Coast), is that for every assignment we are provided with a big chunky manual with all the information an artist would need. Background story, setting description, characters, environments and all that.

Compared to a brief I had once for another project, “there’s a castle in the background and a knight in heroic pose in the foreground”, this was like Christmas.

Anyway, since I had suffered some catastrophic loss of data early this year, for this assignment I made several incremental saves just to be on the safe side. Which gave me the chance to make this short video out of all the WIPs.

While re-watching it I realized that early in the process I had lit several windows of the surrounding buildings with a warm light. I later changed my mind and thought that they were taking too much attention away from the focus of the image, so I got rid of them in the final version.

So yes, I didn’t just forget to activate a layer:)

Anyway, this is how Electrostatic Blast looks like.

You can check it together with the other cards of its set at Alchemy:Innistrad here.

As you might notice, in that set there’s another card I made for this round of Innistrad illustrations (a Mythic, no less!), but I’ll be able to post it only next week.

by Paolo Puggioni

Star Wars – Mutiny

Mutiny is one of the illustrations I made for the Star Wars game by Fantasy Flight Games back in 2018.

Like a throng of other artwork I’ve made in the past few years, I never got around to post it, so there you go, you get to see the old stuff.

Mutiny is based on The Last Jedi, and while I always put some trivia and context around the illustrations I make for Star Wars, I have to confess I’m not entirely on board with the whole sequel thing, so I’ll have to skip this one.

In fact, if you held me at gun point asking me to sum up the three movies in a few sentences, you might as well pull the trigger straight away.

I didn’t really bond with the Rey character, I didn’t quite understand the whole plot, I was upset by the inconsistencies in the writing and, well, I don’t think I re-watched any of them.

BUT.

Poe Dameron wasn’t bad, and luckily it was him the guy who I got to draw from this movie. Plus, I really like Oscar Isaac, so there’s that.
On top of everything, he has some nice and bold facial features to draw, so I did enjoy drawing this.

And lo! I did keep the sketch.

So, about the mutiny.

This is the bit when Poe, unhappy about the passive tactics of Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, together with Rose Tico and a few other decides to take things in his own hands.

Unfortunately the focus had to be just on Poe, so I didn’t get to draw the Vice Admiral’s face, who also had interesting features for a portrait.
But hey, here’s her pink hair instead.

Interestingly, I had painted Poe’s father a while back, Kes Dameron.

Also mildly interesting, I just looked up Kes on the Star Wars Wiki and I noticed that they used the illustration I made, which is pretty nice.

Anyway, I just realized that I’ve been posting a lot of Star Wars things recently, so I’ll take a break from that for a little while.

Some of the artwork I’ve made for Wizards of the Coast has just been teased, so next week I’ll post some Magic the Gathering things instead.

Star Wars – Hoth Ice Cave

Luke’s ice cave on Hoth is another one of the Star Wars illustrations I made for Fantasy Flight Games.

As it happened many, many times, when I read the brief I thought “whoa, I get to draw that?!”

I mean, I think the scene where Luke chops the Wampa’s arm off is one of the most iconic in The Empire Strikes Back, together with the one where Han Solo stuffs him inside the Tauntaun’s belly.

Anyway, this was the only time I got to draw an environment for Star Wars, as literally all the other cards I painted were characters.

One of the reasons I always love doing anything related to Star Wars is that it forces me to do further research on the scenes they refer to, getting me to discover bits of movie trivia and Star Wars lore I probably wouldn’t have come across.

For example (all the following are from The Empire Strikes Back trivia on Imdb):

– it looks like there was some debate over the technicalities of showing Luke’s light saber flying to his hand when he was hanging upside down in the cave.
Eventually they went full old school, and had Mark Hamill simply throw the sabre away and reversed the shot.

– The scene where Luke gets out of the Hoth ice cave was supposed to have some fake snow blown around. Then a huge storm hit the hotel in Norway where the crew was staying at, so the director decided they were perfect conditions for the scene and sent Mark Hamill outside in a real snow storm.

– A part from the scene where he falls down the shaft in the City of Clouds, Mark Hamill did all his stunts in The Empire Strikes Back.

– a different character in each movie says the line “I have a bad feeling about this”. In this movie it’s Leia’s turn.

– During the filming of the Battle of Hoth, the Echo Base troops were actually Norwegian mountain-rescue skiers. In exchange for participation in this movie, Lucasfilm made a donation to the Norwegian Red Cross.

What I learned instead from Inside the World of Star Wars Trilogy is that the Wampa who attacked Luke in the snow wastes is not the same one who was about to eat him in the Hoth ice cave.

The cave was the den of a female Wampa, later nicknamed One-Arm, and contrarily to what one might think she was not a mindless brute.

She later became the leader of a band of other Wampas who preyed on hunters and explorers, and even went on occupying Echo Base after the Rebels had escaped it.

A few years later Luke Skywalker returned to the base with Callista Ming, where One-Arm recognized him and tried to kill him.

Unfortunately Luke was officially a bad ass at the time, and slew her for good with no effort.

by Paolo Puggioni

Star Wars – Hylobon Enforcer

Hylobon enforcer is another one of the illustrations I made for the Star Wars game by Fantasy Flight Games, once again set in the Solo movie.

I know I’ve been posting mostly Star Wars stuff as of recent.
But well, I’ve done a whole lot of it so you’ll have to bear with me with this for a little longer.

As I said last time, while I worked on this set of illustrations I had to re-watch Solo half a dozen times.
I wasn’t super familiar with the lore around it at the time, so every time I read a brief my reaction was a variation of “Hylobon enforcer? What the hell is that?”.

Well it turns out that Hylobon Enforcers were the apes-looking guys that were at the service of Dryden Vos, the figurehead leader of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate, and we see them for the first time in the Solo movie.

I later learned that the true leader of this criminal enterprise was in fact Darth Maul (I really didn’t get what he had to do with it in the movie).
In fact, he remained their leader until his death by the hand of Obi-Wan Kenobi a few years later.

Oh wait, I painted that too!

Anyway, the brief was about a generic Hylobon Enforcer looking though while standing guard.

While re-watching the movie I found out I really liked the design of Dryden Vos’ “throne room”.

Well technically it wasn’t a throne room, as there was no throne in it, and he was no king.

In fact, and I really want to stress this out, Dryden Vos was just a puppet. I can’t believe it took me like fourth views to figure that out.

Either way, those circular windows were a perfect design element to frame a character with, so I couldn’t help placing my Hylobon Enforcer right in front of it.

On top of it providing a very convenient (and setting-consistent) graphical frame, it also allows a nice view of the scenic mountain chains behind. So there it is.

I have to point out (because I was very fastidious with it), that for the gun I took as a reference an official model from the movie.

Fans tend to be really quick to point out inconsistencies, so I try to be as accurate as possible with these details when I have the chance.

by Paolo Puggioni

Star Wars – At Odds

At Odds is the very first illustration I made for Star Wars back in 2016.

Despite having shared the image on Art Station before as well as on this website, I just realized that I had not written anything about it.

Which is a shame! There is a story about this illustration, and not everyone knows it. Well, a part from the millions who watched the Clone Wars of course.
But I wasn’t one of them when I was asked to work on At Odds, so I thought it I was part of some well kept secret when I read the brief.

The brief in question read something along the lines of “Aging Obi-Wan Kenobi battles Darth Maul on the sands of Tatooine”.

After a brief externalization of puzzlement, I wrote to my Art Director at Fantasy Flight Games explaining to him that there must have been a mistake, as Darth Maul had already been killed by Obi-Wan on Naboo. I mean, come on.

It turns out that being chopped in half and being thrown down a bottomless shaft wasn’t enough to kill someone as cool as Darth Maul.

So, I was provided with the description of what happened later:

As his remains tumbled down the generator shaft, he kept his eyes open and fought to remain conscious. But then his head struck the shaft’s wall, and everything went dark.
No!
His mind screamed. Despite everything he had learned about death and duty from his Master, Maul knew he was not yet ready to die. Not after so many years of training, and with so much more to accomplish. Not so long as he still had so much hatred within him.
…
Can’t die!
He fell past an oval shadow, and then a similar shadow raced by, along with a whooshing sound.
Maul hoped that there was at least one more vent below, that it would be large enough to accommodate his diminished body. He extended his arms, and his left hand’s fingertips suddenly burned with friction as they brushed against the cylindrical wall.
Must live!
Hoping, wishing, praying for one more air vent…
Must kill Obi-Wan!
…he reached out with the Force.

Far from me to think this was a lame attempt at jumping the shark by the Star Wars writers. Darth Maul is after all one of the best characters in the franchise and well deserves his Jesus moment.

You just have to tell your brain not to extrapolate and visualize what goes on with his guts and internal organs while doing all this.

Anyway, all good, as it gave me the chance to paint At Odds.

Now, as you can tell by the hatred in the words he utters while trying to survive the fall, Darth Maul had a massive chip on his shoulder towards Obi-Wan Kenobi.

After many adventures and wrongdoings, including overthrowing the government of Mandalore and becoming its ruler, leading a bunch of criminal organizations, fighting (and losing) against Emperor Palpatine and founding the massive criminal empire Crimson Dawn, he finally tracks down Obi-Wan in his exile on Tatooine and gets there to get his revenge.

Unfortunately for him, in a scene where you can see how damn strong of a Jedi master he has become, a majestic Obi-Wan kicks his ass with a single blow of his light saber.

I mean look at that. This time I think we’re pretty sure he won’t come back.

Bonus content: I just remembered that in the effort of making a reel of my work in 2018, I had made a very primitive attempt at parallax animation with this illustration, so…. look at them move!

by Paolo Puggioni

Halloran House Concept

I made the concept for Halloran House back in 2019 if I’m not wrong, for the Tales platform.

If you’re not familiar with it, Tales makes interactive stories for mobile devices. The story lines are consistently well written, captivating and imaginative, so I was always happy to contribute to the visual side of their content.

From 2017 to 2020 I made a huge bunch of artwork for them, and Halloran House was the location of one of the tales, set in New Orleans.

There’s not much I can tell about the project without spoiling the story, unfortunately, so I guess you’ll have to play it if you want to know more.

Anyway, the briefs for the stories always came in batches of 10-12 illustrations each, so I was forced to be quite time-efficient to avoid spending three months on each story.

This is when I started introducing photobashing in my work.

For those who are not familiar with the procedure, photbashing is the practice of combining together bits and pieces from existing pictures, then to tweak colours, values and all the rest to make a coherent composition.

It’s fairly standard in concept art, as it’s very time-efficient and it allows you to save the time you would waste on minor details like, I don’t know, power outlets or door handles.

Despite it being accepted and common practice, I always feel unreasonably guilty when I bash together stock images. So I always end up using them only to have a believable perspective grid and overall palette, and then I compulsively paint over as much as I can.

The end result is always something in the range of 85% painted and 15% textures and pasted details, which is a good mix between the realistic and hand-painted look I was after for Halloran House.

I was toying with the idea of making a big giant post with the whole load of concepts I made for Tales.
Then I changed my mind thinking it was better to post them one by one, so you won’t have the impression that I only make Star Wars things.

Long story short, I’ll sprinkle them here and there on this space in the weeks to come.

by Paolo Puggioni

Star Wars – Corellian Hounds

Corellian Hounds is another one of the illustrations I made a couple of years ago for the Star Wars CCG by Fantasy Flight Games.

Like I say every time, I have no memory whatsoever of what particular expansion this belonged to, so you’ll have to do some digging if you are really interested:)

While I worked on this image I was also assigned several other illustrations based from the movie Solo, so I had to watch it several times in a relatively brief period of time.

Despite Solo not being exactly a record breaker at the box office, I have to say that I really didn’t mind it.

Sure, some things or some characters owe their charm to their sense of mystery, so NOT knowing how the sausage is made is the way to go more often than not.

For example, I was entirely happy to be oblivious to Yoda’s Midi-chlorian score.
At the same time, I’m not sure that Han Solo’s image gained anything by having his backstory made public.

However, if we really NEED to have a movie about young Han Solo, well this one wasn’t that bad.
Better than seeing young Anakin racing on Tatooine, just to name one.

Anyway, the Corellain Hounds are a race indigenous to Corellia, which is where a part of the movie is set.

While young Han is trying to leave the planet chased by bad guys, his pursuers unleash these ferocious animals onto him and Daenerys Targaryen, which is what this illustration depicts (minus Han and Khaleesi, out of the frame).

Corellian Hounds are known for their supernatural sense of smell, their fierceness, and the fact that they can regenerate their fangs.

They’re also quite valuable, so owning a pack is considered a sign of high status on Corellia.

While researching for this image, I also learned that the Corellian Hounds in the movie were not CG!
In the same way they used elephants for the Banthas in Episode IV, they decided to use live animals with foam suits instead of CG models.

I always prefer practical effects to CG in movies, so I’m quite a fan of this decision.

Also, it looks like after their several months’ long training the dogs were happy to wear suits and masks, which is another big plus.

Let’s see if you can tell they’re actual dogs in this deleted scene.

Anyway, as I said I have a few other illustrations set in the movie Solo, I hope I’ll have the time to post them in the next few days.

by Paolo Puggioni

Star Wars – Shien Training

Shien Training is one of the illustrations I made for the Star Wars game by Fantasy Flight Games.

For those of you who don’t speak nerd, Shien is the Jedi discipline that involves using a lightsaber to deflect incoming blaster shots and various projectiles.

To be even more clear, this is Shien Training:

This illustration makes the pair with another one I had made at about the same time, called Shien Mastery.

In Shien Mastery, Darth Vader goes all braggy by deflecting as many as TWO shots at the same time.

In Shien Training, Luke is still a Padawan (and blind), and deflecting Boba Fett’s blaster was pretty much all he could focus on in that moment.

Still pretty badass if you ask me.

Now, “when the hell this this happen?”, you may wonder. “I didn’t see this in the movie”!

Don’t fret my nerds, I’ve read the canon comic, and I’ll tell you everything about it.

After Luke destroyed the first Death Star in A New Hope, Darth Vader really wanted to put his hands on his – spoiler alert – newly found son.
In order to do so, he put a bounty on his head and asked Boba Fett to go find him and to bring him back alive.

At the time, Luke was in Tatooine with R2-D2, trying to find clues in Obi-Wan’s house about how he could continue his Jedi training.
He had to defeat a whole bunch of Sand People before he could enter the empty hut, and after a long search he finds a diary that on his cover read “for Luke”.

That’s already so cool, in my opinion. Over all those years Obi-Wan had always known he would sacrifice himself before he could have the chance to train Luke properly.

Anyway, Luke doesn’t have the time to read a single page, because at that moment a flash grenade detonates right before his eyes, making him blind. Boba Fett has found him.

Luke gets up and challenges his opponent.

Luke: “I’m not going anywhere with you”
Boba Fett: “You can’t fight me blind. You couldn’t fight me even if you could see”.
Luke: “A Jedi doesn’t need eyes”.
Boba Fett: “Maybe. But you’re no Jedi”

A great fight ensues. I have to point out that while doing research for this image, I learned the meaning of all the various appendages in Boba Fett’s Mandalorian armour.

You might have noticed that I’ve drawn a bunch of braids tied around his right shoulder. Well, they are the braids he cut from the hair of all the Jedi trainees he had already killed, so well, he wasn’t new at this.

The moment depicted in the illustration follows a violent exchange of blows, so I have to confess that to be consistent with the lore I would have had to paint Luke a lot more bloody and battered.

Nonetheless, since Boba Fett has taken some blows as well and he’s running out of patience, he takes out his blaster with the intention of shooting Luke. Not to kill him, but at least to knock him out so that he can take him to Darth Vader.

Thanks to his Shien training, Luke manages to deflect the shot back to Boba Fett, incapacitating him, and eventually to escape.
He’s still blind, but his faithful R2-D2 will guide him though the sands.

There you go, now you know everything there is to know about Shien Training.

by Paolo Puggioni.

Star Wars – Cantina Band

Cantina Band is one of the illustrations I made for Star Wars back in 2018, and just like pretty much all the others, I loved immensely working on this.

I still remember the sense of wonder when, as a 5 years old, I watched Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan enter that wretched hive of scum and villainy, and for the first time show the sense of the diversity of races in the Star Wars Universe.

As it happened quite often reading the briefs I got from Fantasy Flight Games, I thought “whoooa, I get to draw this??”.

The illustration was quite straight forward, as I just had to depict Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes (did you know that was the name of the band? Now you do!) while performing.
I had to look up pretty much all the images of Biths available on the internet (did you know this was the race of the performers? Now you do!), as I didn’t want to just grab a screenshot from the movie and copy from that.

Anyway, here they are.

And if you want to have something stuck in your head while readning the rest, here’s the scene the illustration refers to.

Now, some random trivia, my nerds.

– According to the lore, the band was composed by eight members. When Luke and Obi-Wan enter Mos Easley’s Cantina, only seven are on stage, while one of them was having a break at the bar.

– Mos Easley’s cantina was actually owned by a Wookie named Chalmun

– the beverages served at the Cantina included Jawa Juice, Blue Milk, Tatooine Sunset, Yatooni Boska, Tatooni Junko and Hutt’s Delight.

– the fact that droids were not allowed inside the Cantina was not due to discrimination. Rather, since droids would not eat or drink, they would have taken the spot of paying customers, hence the ban.

– the Cantina Band scene went through a reshoot after the film was almost completed, adding a bigger variety of aliens inside the venue. However, the movie had already gone over budget by quite a lot, so to save some money on extras Lucas grabbed random employees from the office, including secretaries and accountants.

As far as the illustration goes, I would have framed it slightly differently, but the card had to include the graphic layout, so I had to leave some space to the right and at the top. This is why it’s cropped this way.

To keep a little bit of consistency, next time I’ll post another illustration I’m pretty happy with, which happens to depict Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Blue Graces

Blue Graces is one of the illustrations I made for Game of Thrones back in 2019.

At the cost of repeating myself, I have the memory of a goldfish, so I have no idea whatsoever of what particular expansion this belonged to.

I have to confess I was curious at some point, and I didn’t want to start yet another post with “sorry”, so I did check the throng of packs I’ve worked on.

Long story short, I couldn’t find this card in the first 80% of packs I individually opened and browsed.

So, well, I stopped because I had other stuff to do and I ran out of time to do it. I guess we’ll never know.

Like that joke of the inmates who escape prison and climb 99 of the 100 fences to get out, and then go “fuck it I’m tired, I’m going back”.

Anyway, for those who never heard of the Blue Graces and are itching to discover what they’re all about, say no more! I’ll explain.

The Graces are priestess of Slavers’ Bay in Mereen.

They live in the majestic Temple of The Graces, and they are divided into different orders, conveniently identifiable by the colour of their robes.

All of them have made a vote of chastity, a part from the Red Graces, who serve in the Pleasure Houses and whose job description demands no chastity at all.

The Green Grace is the head priestess of the temple, and I happen to have drawn her as well at some point.

The Pink Graces are the personal attendants of the Green Grace, while the Blue Graces are healers and surgeons.

For this illustration in particular I meant to depict a common scene, almost of routine, with no drama.
That’s why I chose warm fuzzy colours for the background and the skin tones, which also made a good contrast with the robes of the Blue Graces.

The wounded guy they’re tending to is just a random soldier who’s being patched up after a fight in the arena, so I made him turn around and shifted the focus on the healers, who are the main characters of the composition.

And lo! I even found the sketch I did for this. Nothing ground breaking, but that’s how I started this illustration..

And since I went through the trouble of upsetting all the Game of Thrones packs on my shelf, here’s a picture of it for bragging rights, once it was back in order.

by Paolo Puggioni