Glenn the Voice of Calm, the first card I’ve made for Magic the Gathering and my first work for Wizards of the Coast, makes me officially an MTG illustrator, which is pretty cool if you ask me.

I’ve wanted to work for them for at least 20 years, so you can imagine how happy I was when one of their Art Directors got in touch with me out of the blue asking if I was free.

Only an iron will and a strong professionalism prevented me to reply “For you? Fuck yes!”.
It was implied though, and after a few months and a surprisingly smooth and painless round of sketches-feedback-roughs-finals we came up with this.

Now, you may ask how a character from the show The Walking Dead fits into the traditionally Fantasy setting of Magic the Gathering.

The short answer is, I don’t know. I used to be an avid Magic the Gathering player back in the ’90s, but I stopped following its development (other than its artwork) a long time ago to save my sanity.

I have to confess I didn’t even ask, I just wanted to work for Wizards of the Coast!

I can only say that it was huge fun. The Art Director was great, I had to re-watch the first seasons of the Walking Dead, I had to take an insane amount of screenshots of Zombies as a reference, and that I had the pleasure of painting Glenn, who happened to be my favorite character from the show.

I was also chuffed to learn that apparently the portrait I made was directly approved by Steven Yeun, who played the character in the series!

For once, I also happen to have saved some of the sketches.
They’re pretty much variations of poses.
The shot had to be frontal, with no weird perspectives and with a bunch of Zombies in the background.

There wasn’t much room for variations, really.

Now, once one of the sketches was approved (after a few tweaks to zoom the character in) I made a couple of variations for the lighting.

The first one I made, shown below, had Glenn’s face slightly in the shadow, which I thought would have been an original way of distancing from the usual “let’s put a light in the point of interest to show what’s important in the canvas”.

I was actually pretty happy with it, I thought it was a great idea! As it happens, the Art Director wouldn’t have it so I ended up adding more saturation and brightness on and around Glenn’s face, which is what you see in the final image.

To be honest, I don’t know what I was thinking, that’s what Art Directors are for:) I mean, look at them side by side.

The first thing you think of in the first image is “nice, a big bright orange backpack. Oh and is that a face up there?”. So in hindsight I’m glad someone else talked me out of it.

Anyway, this is now Glenn the Voice of Calm, forever in the Wizards of the Coast records. I don’t have other Magic the Gatherings cards lined up so far this year, if there will be more in the future this is where I’ll brag about it first.

by Paolo Puggioni