If you didn’t hit the last Lhurgoyf section via Facebook, Twitter or a couple of Magic boards you may be wondering what’s up with the delayed part 5.
The short version is that there was a family health emergency and things are still touch and go. Just a quick heads up. Normal service will resume when things are a little less… fraught.
The current sketch’s readability issue was really just related to where the head was, so I moved the head up to the upper left of the image. This kept the center of the figure uncluttered, gave the head a prominent location in the image and filled a growing area of dead space in the upper left of the picture. Win/Win! It fixed a whole host of issues and as a bonus, also gave the Lhurgoyf a more defiant, aggressive look. Probably a good thing as WotC wanted an image that exemplified the power of a pumped-up Lhurgoyf.
The final sketch awaits.
The rejection of the first sketch came as a blow, especially given how long I’d spent trying to nail down a composition I was happy with.
The people responsible for signing off on Magic art (chiefly the art director and at least one member of story and R&D) felt that the Lhurgoyf was too thin and lacked the power that was associated with this fearsome creature. I pointed out that the new Lhurgoyf was actually a little more muscular than his predecessor, but this fell on deaf ears. They wanted me to make him bigger and tougher. I had to scrap the foreshortening notion as that was going to be counterproductive to making the figure look larger.
Okay, so what the hell do I do now?
Having decided that I need to significantly boost the image’s dynamism, I tried to get the Lhurgoyf running.
The sketching continues.