Hiya! Welcome to Arting Around. This week I was lucky enough to interview Magic artist Anthony Palumbo and he offered fantastic, warm, deeply personal answers. I’m passing the good fortune of the interview onto you, dear readers. Enjoy!
Matt Jones: My buddy Kadar and I started putting together a cube from the many foils we acquire during matches of our Brooklyn team draft league. Once we got going on it mana fixing became a big problem and Cultivate (from a non-TDL donation) became one of the most vital cards in the cube. I’d pick the damn thing because the art is so beautiful. There’s a real kindness there. A lot of Magic cards are brutal, monstrous, aggressive. Your illustration for Cultivate is gentle, warm, and loving. Can you talk about what instructions you got for illustrating Cultivate, your thought process going into creating it, and share with us any early sketches of the illustration prior to completion (if you’ve got any laying around!)?
Anthony Palumbo: Thank you for the kind words about Cultivate. This was the first Magic card assignment I ever did, and really my first ever professional freelance illustration job. At the time (2009), Jeremy Jarvis was the sole art director responsible for assigning cards to artists, and he took a chance on me. My brother and fellow Magic illustrator David Palumbo introduced me to Jeremy at a bar during San Diego Comicon, where I was trying to meet people in the fantasy/science fiction publishing world and show off my portfolio. My portfolio consisted entirely of gallery-oriented oil paintings with no obvious connection to fantasy illustration, and after looking at my paintings the actual words out of Jeremy’s mouth were “Okay… I’m going to take a chance on you…” I knew he was going out on a limb with me, and I’ve always felt grateful to him for it. Because he saw that my background was in realistic figurative painting, my Magic card assignments have always centered around this. So a close up of a hand wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me. The art directors take their artists’ strengths and natural tendencies into account, and I tend to get assigned cards with a stillness and quiet to them, as opposed to violent action. That ability to keep over 100 artists’ strengths and weakness in mind simultaneously and assign the right card to the right artist is what propelled the quality of Magic card art to the top under Jeremy’s watch, in my opinion. For Cultivate, (pulling some quotes from the assignment) I was asked to give an impression of a “lush” and “hearty” “pattern of new growth” emerging from the “dry barren earth”. I only had one strong image in my mind of what the card would look like, and I tried to do my best. The feedback Jeremy gave me about this sketch for my first Magic assignment was “So far so good! <<APPROVED>>” I came to understand that Magic card feedback would be short and to the point. If it was more than six words long, it probably meant the artist was in trouble!
MJ: Wow. That response was amazing. Thank you! Question two: since Cultivate, how has your life changed?
AP: My life has changed since then in almost every way possible. Cultivate marked a major career change, being my first illustration assignment from a big company. Prior to that, I’d been living off of sales of paintings in art galleries. The gallery money was very uneven and unpredictable, and I’d been thinking about branching out into freelance illustration work as another source of income. Since I started six years ago, Wizards has provided a steady flow of card illustration jobs. Not a gushing torrent, but a nice steady predictable trickle giving me a cushion of much needed financial stability, while leaving me enough time for other art jobs and personal projects.
MJ: Anthony, I can’t believe how amazing your story is. Seems like your journey has actually been, ehem, magical! I don’t actually know how to follow up the last question. Your answer is so complete. I think I’ll just toss out a really easy one, end on an artsy note. Of all the cards you’ve illustrated which is your favorite and why?
AP: Thank you, Matt! My favorite card I’ve painted is my Angel Token. It was the angels of artists like Chris Moeller and Brom that most attracted me to Magic card art in the beginning. The assignment description was what I always envisioned my ideal Magic card assignment to be, from before I even started painting Magic cards. It asked me to paint the Angel as “A beautiful harbinger of glory and protection.” with shiny armor, and aside from those words I was given the freedom to design pretty much whatever I liked. So much fun!
