In Magic‘s third return to Innistrad, we had a two part story. Our first journey features the raw violence of werewolves vs the refined violence of vampires on the second part.
I commissioned these pieces as marketing art to be released during different campaign beats, accompanied by relevant product shots and messaging, across social, paid media and web assets.
The themes were to progress in action, as well as time of day, as we work from the moon being visible but still having some daylight, to the chaos of night.
Though Magic has a tendency to have very consistent art styles, for marketing art I liked to embed a bit more variety in the styles to set us apart and give us a bolder unexpected delivery. This is why Dominik Mayer was a choice for this first teaser.
I wanted a large dramatic werewolf silhouette with eyes shining in the dark, looming large over the Harvesttide Festival that the unsuspecting humans were participating on. The image would hype the impending destruction that would occur once the werewolves descended onto the festival grounds. Dominik lent us his signature graphic style and gave us a very eye catching introduction back to Innistrad.
I like to set up teaser art as something that is building up hype. For our next teaser art, I had Andreas Zafeiratos showcase the duality from man to werewolf by displaying a man standing in the woods, backlit by a big moon, casting a large werewolf shadow, signaling his impending change.
After the success of Anna Podedworna’s art for Kaldheim, I brought her back on for our first launch art. I wanted the art to show a werewolf character in the stages of changing. The aggressive nature of growing fangs and claws, sprouting fur, bones shifting, flesh tearing. Yuxtaposing the human fear on a partially visible human face, with the raw ferocity of the werewolf body and posture would help drive our tagline “Become What You Fear” home.
To culminate this gothic horror festival, Lie Setiawan created a piece to showcase a pack of werewolves on the hunt at the festival. A lead werewolf as a focal point as he terrorizes the grounds. We can also see his packmates creating chaos with abandon around him, well after they have all succumbed to the powers of the moon.
Preparing our audience for the next set’s shift in tone, I commissioned Alix Branwin to create a piece that would combine the werewolves and vampires. I encouraged her to use symbolism that would signal the switch between the Harvesttide fall scenery to a darker more opulent one (fall leaves and frost to blood rose petals, etc), as well as the difference in our two characters’ type of danger.
As mentioned above, these pieces were commissioned to be used across social, paid media and web assets that I also art directed and produced. Here are a couple of those executions making good use of the safe zones built into the direction for the artists.
