Innistrad part 3

Four more from the Innistrad Magic: the Gathering block.  The above piece is called "Daybreak Ranger".  I'm not sure how great of a card it is but it seemed to resonate with fans.  It's a fun piece with a ludicrous weapon but my job is to make the ludicrous weapon look cool.  Innistrad is gothic horror setting and much of the look (especially of the humans) was taken from vaguely colonial historical vibes such as what you'd see in a movie like Sleepy Hollow or Ravenous.  However, no musket or other firearm weaponry exists in this Innistrad world so we had to come up with something along those lines but....well, but NOT.  Difficult.  But crossbows and bowguns seemed to do the trick.  How does she fire this without losing her fingers, you ask?  I thought maybe the bow string is held out away from the barrel of the gun just enough to get past her fingers.  Whatevs, I think it looks cool!  And I'm particularly pleased with the expression on her face - pensive and searching the trees for prey.

This one is the image on the back of the above card.  It is called "Nightfall Predator" and is supposed to be the Daybreak Ranger transformed into a lycanthrope.  Thus the similar mood/coloring, etc.

This one is called "GhoulRaiser".  i was having trouble with making it work in the painting phase.  So much so that I scrapped the image about half way through and started over.  but the second time through i went with an extremely limited palette: yellow ochre, burnt umber, and paynes gray.  I added touches of cad red medium later.  I think for this card, the limited palette gave me some focus and it worked for setting up the mood, too.

This one is called "Parallel Lives".  A wolf head (Innistrad wolf, that is) with a mirror image of itself.  I thought this was maybe going to be a decent card and so didn't want to take the easy route and just digitally flip one half of the painting.  So I drew it all out (well, I digitally flipped the drawing to make sure it was symmetrical) and painted it as a full image.  To play up the fact that this was not digitally manipulated, I made sure to make subtle differences here and there - the branches are slightly different on either side and only one wolf has a little drip of drool hanging off its lip!