Duel of the Planeswalkers Avatars

Not too long ago, I was asked to create a cycle of Planeswalker-esque avatars for the Duels of the Planeswalker 2013 video game. So one black, one white, one blue, one green, and one red. It was pretty open ended and I jumped at the chance to work on it.

I love the thought of intelligent sea beings so that was the direction I knew I'd have to take the blue avatar in. Why not come up with my own half crustacean, half fish merfolk? Here he is:




Aside from choosing from any of the existing races in the M:TG multiverse I was also free to come up with a new race. That is what I hoped to do with the white avatar. Maybe a race that lived their life high in the mountain tops, almost up in the clouds. I had the basic design of her rolling around in my head for awhile but I hadn't found a use for it yet. Here she is:

Yeva, Nature's Herald

Yeva was probably one of my top three favorite magic cards to paint in the last year. In my mind she is the leader of her clan. As a sign of solidarity she had her face scared starting at the corners of her eyes. It is as if her tear ducts had been carved out.

Designing the barding on the bear was a unique challenge I wasn't expecting. At first I tried to hang a lot of cloth from the animal as well covering much more of it's face with leather armor. The problem was that bears are just too cute and they are much more human-like than a horse is. It looked goofy and a little anthropomorphized. The ears were really killing me... Too much attention was being brought to those rounds fuzzy ears. I decided to back it off and go a simple a possible.