This started as a commission for another Magic: the Gathering judge. They wanted a nice piece of art of the Drag queens Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova. I don’t know a lot about drag culture, but one of my friends was big into RuPaul’s Drag Race and we watched a few seasons together. In particular the season that Trixie Mattel actually won, so I had a little bit of info.

The first part of this started with me looking at reference images. Drawing faces is tough for me, but luckily the two queens have such unique makeup styles that even if I botched their faces horribly they'd still be recognizable! (Not that I wanted to botch them horribly, though.)

The client wanted me to emulate the style of my Avacyn playmat, but I ended up going in a more "stained glass" direction than my other mats, which lean more to the Art Nouveau style. I had to do a little research to figure out what to include other than the two ladies, and managed to incorporate some small homages to their characters in the little bubbles. The final image for the judge included border and a name bar at the bottom, since he had wanted a print. But when I later made it into a playmat, I had to remove that because of space concerns.

Overall this was a rather short project; from conception to completion was a little under a month, and most of the actual work was done like a week before the deadline. Still I enjoyed working on it and am pretty happy with how it came out!