The community manager for the judge program in Canada wanted to make some judge tokens, similar to how Star City Games has player and judge tokens. I was contacted as someone both affiliated with art and with judging. I was really excited to work on the project as doing Magic tangential work always excites me!

Painting likenesses of real people was pretty intimidating, I'm bad with faces and didn't want to make someone I know and respect look funny. I spent a lot of time looking at reference pictures and working hard to replicate what I saw. The other challenge was getting the creature type right. One of the more challenging ones was for Jason Wong, because he didn't have a reference image for his face that wasn't scrunched up! His request was to be a disgruntled homunculus on a clue token.

The other part of the project was the card backs. Anything with the official Magic logo on it has to be approved by Wizards of the Coast, and getting their approval on the tokens was challenging at best. Eventually we ended up using the Canadian Magic Judge logo instead.

I was pretty pleased with most of the tokens. It was a challenging project that really helped me work on some of the skills I'm weaker at.