It's no secret that I love Magic: the Gathering. It's been a big part of my life these past years and I'm constantly looking for excuses to draw fanart for it. The idea for the Art Nouveau Planeswalkers came about because of two things. One: I was looking at ways to improve my art and one of the greats (Noah Bradley) had posted something about doing 'master studies'; a kind of drill where you try to recreate something an old master has done. I didn't really have time for that kind of project then because of my work schedule, but I did want to work on something, and preferably something I could bring to conventions. Then in the Altered Art group on Facebook I saw someone do an entire set of unlimited dual lands with famous Art Nouveau pieces on them. And that's when I came up with the idea. I would do a kind of 'master study' copying famous pieces of artwork, but making them the magic planeswalkers.

The method for this was fairly simple: I would take a famous Art Nouveau piece, draw a sketch of the walker, ink it, scan it, and color it, also picking an appropriate background and doing the circle design with mana symbols.

I tried to pick Art Nouveau images that would accentuate each character's personality. For example, Nissa's original was holding flowers:

And tamiyo's original was holding a book:

After the project was done, I felt like I still wanted to do more. It was so short compared to the ambitious card projects I had been tackling, so I decided to do two 'bonus' walkers. Jace and Garruk:

These elicited a lot of weird responses from people! Many people enjoyed a more effeminate look at our male planeswalkers. And it spawned a myriad of strange requests such as Nicol Bolas or Karn done in the same style! For now we're going to spare the rest their masculinity, but who knows what might happen in the future. I also adapted the design to a playmat which I bring to tournaments regularly! (Note: because of copyright restrictions, the mat on Inked Gaming does not feature the official mana symbols.)

This was a fun and rewarding project. There are no pieces I regret or don't like. Due to the fact that it was so small I really had time to focus on each piece and make it look nice! It also really pushed me as an artist, trying to emulate something so skillfully mastered by another. I definitely want to do more projects like this in the future.