Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1165: Bloomburrow Art Direction with Zack Stella

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Zack Stella, Bloomburrow's Art Director, to talk about the visual look of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition. So today we're talking about the art direction of Bloomberg with Zach Stella, the art director for the set. Say hey Zach. Hello, hello. Okay so let's start from the very beginning. How early does the art director get assigned to a world? How early did you know you were doing Bloomberg? Oh, hmm, probably two years ahead of the actual set release. Do you get assigned during exploratory world building or does it happen after that?

We kind of get assigned for exploratory. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty early on. Okay, so we're doing Animal World. What were your first thoughts? From an art director's standpoint, what matters? What were you thinking about? So out of the whole team, I'm probably the one that's the most nature-based,

so I was probably the right person that they put on this one. More importantly than small animals, it was like the small portion of it. It was like this will be the first time that we were doing like small scale or just like a totally different scale from a normal magic set. So there was large consideration right out of the gate of like how we were going to tackle things at like a completely different scale than we would normally see. This is also just a very nature-based set, so there's a lot of consideration into how to make everything not look like it was necessarily like a green card, even though technically it is very green.

So another important thing I know that I've heard you talk about is we want to like the whole idea of the set is we're capturing animals, but also like we want to both have them actually feel like animals, but also fill the role. I mean, you know, they're kind of our main characters. So like you have dual purpose in trying to make the set look right. Yeah, we put a lot of time and effort into trying to get the anatomy sheets. I had April Prime and Aurora Folney on my push, and they're both known for like, April especially is known for small animal character concepts.

So I wanted to make sure that both the anatomy was looking correct, just like if it was an animal that just basically stood up and put on clothes. That was kind of the goal. And especially like facial features, like animals can go cartoon really fast if you don't get like the proper amount of like musculature and how much they can smile and like how much white is in their eyes, etc, etc. And, and so what did you do to make sure that you that the animals felt like the animals they needed to be? Just a lot of iteration, a lot of character studies. We made these sheets on the concept push where we had little green check marks and red Xs for like, this is wide enough.

This is too wide on the mouth and whatnot. It was a lot of tweaking as we were going along. Yeah, one of the things that the audience may or may not know is we make what we call a world guide, which is, you know, we spend a lot of time getting visuals so that the artists have something to look at so that there's, cause we want all the artists to be drawing something where they look like the same world

and not vary greatly from artist to artist. Yeah, correct. It's a three week sprint. We bring in like a small specialized team. In this case, it's like usually five five artists plus our three in-house, four in-house actually. Okay, so let's I'm going to walk through the animals a little bit and I want to talk about the challenge of the once again the illustration of each of these animal types. Sure. And I'm going to go in woo bird gardenner because that's the order I like to go in. So, if that was white, blue, which is the birds,

what was the challenge of capturing the birds? Birds, it was definitely emotion. It's very hard for a beak to emote anything and they don't really have eyebrows. So, it was like, how much exactly do we want their face to move around where they can actually still feel like characters and not just like literal birds with clothes on.

So the visual goals here were like things that would also make them exciting on cards. So we wanted like lots of motion showing in their costuming where they've got like little fluttery ribbons and flashes of color. I know like I've spoken about this like multiple times, but I wanted this set to come like come across as if you're going to the zoo and you're getting like a collection of animal types and birds was one of those easier ones where like it's very easy to change their shapes and colors where they look very distinct on each of the cards.

And I know that like for each when you did you do what's called an art direction like we say to the artist, here's what I want you to draw. And for each bird, like you specify the actual bird it was, right? I did, yeah. There was a lot of consideration for the size too, because birds are like very varied in size.

So I was a stickler for like making sure that we didn't end up with like tiny hummingbirds on like four fours and stuff like that. And I'm just curious, like how did you figure out what bird made sense for what card? I think I just have like an innate knowledge of... I just have a very good visual dictionary, I guess. Yeah, like some of it's just kind of knowing what colors are appropriate where and just like sizing based on the power and toughness.

And thankfully this was one of those sets that like that didn't seem to change around in the game design end too much like super late. Yeah and it's funny because one of the things once the art is done like we don't want to change like design is kind of locked in on certain things once the art is done and in this set like, like, oh, the birds are certain sizes, so I got certain birds, so please don't change the size on me. So that's very interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think there might have been like maybe one or two that we just rearranged at the last minute as we had to. OK, let's move on to the next one. So blue block is the rats. What was the challenge of visually bringing the rats to life? For me, rats have been done so many times. It was like, and they're all usually in blue and black.

So like, or maybe they haven't actually been blue. Mostly black, yeah, rats are mostly black, but historically. Yeah, so it was like, how do you do them interesting this time around? I know they're like literal rats this time, but yeah, they needed like an interesting hook. So we came up with this like insect park thing like where they're kind of

like bug worshippers when they're living in this tidal marsh. It was a great way to give them like extra pops of color and like just make them look kind of more aggressive because they can get these like cool beetle shapes in their armor and stuff like that. I actually fell in love with the rats. I did not think that they were gonna be like one of my favorites, but anytime you combine something with like giant ride on bugs and stuff like that, it becomes super fun real fast.

Yeah, I've heard from a lot of rats, actually if you have rats as pets, they're supposedly very, very nice animals in that they're much more aligned by pop culture. And so I think they're a lot nicer than people think of them as rats being. So yeah, that was one of those animals too that like I tried very hard to pair artists with animals that they had as pets. So like I knew a bunch of people that had rats. Oh, that's cool that you pick animals, artists that actually had rats, that's very cool. Yeah, it was easy for the rabbits,

it was easy for the rats. And then I actually had an artist that had ferrets too, so like she was a natural fit to do anything with cruel claw too. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so the next one is lizards. Any artists have lizards? I forgot to ask about the lizards.

So the lizards were fun this time because they're not actually native to valleys. So this was another one that liked the birds. I could vary their shapes a lot because I could go outside of what is normally found in like an Eastern European or like Eastern American biome. Again, like super varied in color and shape. And in this case, they got like this tile motif and I love to put like masks on characters to it immediately make something feel more like a magic card when they get like a cool aggressive mask. So I definitely leaned into it here on like the the lizards and the actually the rats had masks too.

Okay, well that's super cool. Okay, now we get on to red green, which is the raccoons. Raccoons, I forget how early along it came about that I was like, oh, what if we did like this sort of thing with their weapons where it was like, if a tree trunk grows around a bicycle where they have these like wooden weapons that they would basically just like store their stuff in where like where you get like bark just growing around all their objects. I think it was probably like early on that

we figured out that their mechanic was kind of like junk based. So we wanted to make sure that they had like a way to carry it around with them. And Neil came up with this story motif of them being travelers. So we also wanted to make sure they had a way to carry all that stuff. Now the other thing, we've talked about scope, like raccoons are a little bit bigger than some of the other animals. How important was that in, how much of a challenge was that? It wasn't so much a challenge if they were on a card by themselves. We definitely have a card where it's like a raccoon and a mouse together.

So when it's like big animal, little animal, you want to make sure that they're still like kind of going to read pretty clearly at card size when it's you know shrunk down to an inch inch box of art. Yeah I the other thing I super love about the raccoons is their homes are basically like we leaned very hard into the cottage core on the raccoon houses because every part of the raccoon house is basically built into the trees. Super cool. OK, next up, green white. We have the rabbits. So rabbits, I used to have a rabbit.

So I had a soft spot for bunnies. This was another one, too, that like, even though I had a rabbit, I wasn't sure they were going to be my favorite. But as we were working on them and we kind of like fell on that visual motif of like making all of their weapons basically just like metalized vegetables and making their costuming out of like just like plant coloring that you normally see in a garden, they came together super easily

and they're very striking on cards. Also rabbits, when they get aggressive, they look terrifying. Yeah, the rabbits are super cute. I like how the rabbits came out. Okay, let's move on to white black. What was the challenge of making the bats? Bats was the one that I thought out of the gate was going to be my

absolute favorite just because they feel the most like magic e to me like right right away. And they were able to let me lean into like kind of like the 1980s fantasy or like sort of like weird muppety vibes just based off of their like big mouths and huge ears and big eyes. Like they just have over-exaggerated features that like make for a very, they're just very animal. Like they look very animal. I think the challenge here was like, how do we build their homes in such a way that it steers clear of what we're doing with the birds and some of the other flying animals

in the set, or just like the tree based ones? Like, how do we keep them off the squirrel homes too, especially because like the bats are kind of gothic by nature and like the squirrels were already doing kind of a goth thing for this set. Oh yeah, and the most important thing is I had to give them extra fingers. They had to look like magic casters. So rather than having them carry their weapons and cast their magic with their feet, we had to make sure that they had a way to cast magic. So giving them extra fingers and changing their anatomy

was definitely something we had to do for the bats. Were there other animals that you changed the anatomy or bats the one you did the most anatomy changing? Bats were definitely they went the hardest on the anatomy changes and I'm not even really sure we did do much for the other animals I tried to do it with the raccoons because there's there's really only one kind of raccoon So to make them look varied on cards I tried some stuff where I was changing the striping on their tails and stuff like that they wouldn't normally have in nature.

Some of that didn't really come through in the final card set. Okay, so next up is blue, red, the otters. What were the challenge of illustrating the otters? Everybody loves otters. I knew this one was gonna be a hit. So we did this thing where otters. I knew this one was gonna be a hit. So, we did this thing where like otters normally have these like natural pockets in their skin that they normally like put pebbles and things in that they love.

So, and also as a red creature here like we knew they were gonna be like playing around with lightning and magical elements. So, we did this, let's capture lightning in a bottle literally gag with them where like they actually have like pockets and like things on their clothes that are built in for storing spells for later. Yeah, we knew early on that they were going to be the one of the spellcasters, you know, being in blue red., so. Yeah. In the set, too, we did this really cool thing with their houses being these boats that would link together

as if it was like when you see otters holding hands. So it's like their boats can actually link together where they make these little circular communities. And oh, yeah, and they have their own sport, too. Yes. For example, let's talk about Otterball for a second, how much of a visual challenge is it? Like, okay, there's this sport they play.

Sports in Magic the Gathering have always been like kind of at odds. Like it immediately reads as like a different game. You know, it's like, it doesn't really lend itself well to like looking like things are going into combat if they're decked out in like team gear basically. So, so we tried to make sure that like any of the Otter Ball costuming that we came up with had to look like they could still join up in an adventuring party and still like do the aggressive thing with all the other animals if they needed to when they're fighting calamity beasts.

Okay, next up is black green, the squirrels. What were the challenge of squirrels? Well this is the first time we're going hard on like squirrel necromancer. Like I know squirrels have been in black green previously, but this was like the first time we could go like really balls to the wall with the black elements of them. So it was like I wanted to come up with this like motif where like the green squirrels were more like leaf skeletons in their costuming and the black squirrels were more actual skeletons in their costuming and then you can get like a cool blend over each of them yeah and April just like nailed the design on the concept push like right away but like

she uh she landed on something I like to call dark elegance where they look um very gothic but just very very cool and elegant um so she like put these bones like running up and down their tails and like she, we have this like quilt motif in the set. She was able to like quilt their costuming in such a way that it looked like grand and regal. Yeah, it's interesting as we walk through the animals that there actually was two goals. One was what does the animal visually look like? And the second is, what's the costuming? Because one of the big things on the genre we're playing with is the animal's dress you know in clothing because that's key to the genre. Yeah and it was something I had to definitely hammer home with the artist too is like squirrels actually only have like four fingers so that was like one of the things I was catching all the time they were trying to give them extra fingers all the time.

So bats get extra fingers but squirrels no they don't get extra fingers. No squirrels they need to go back down to four fingers. Okay so now we get to red white which we're talking about genre influence probably one of the most influential things of the genre is the mice are our protagonists in many of the this type of story. Yeah, so Tiny Hero was like the top line for mice. Just outside of Maple, I wanted to make sure that like all the mice have this like small hero thing going on where you can kind of get a sense that they're kind of like, even though there's 10 animal

types in this set, they're definitely like the focus So they got like little little Caplets made out of leaves that could like flutter in the wind and help them look extra heroic and I wanted like fencing decorum Just to make sure they sort of read like on the light side of heroism So they all have like these little weapons that are based off of like twigs and things that are sharpened into little poking sticks This was one of the ones that, as a kid when you go into the woods and you pick up a really cool stick and you're like, this is the sword, that's kind of the vibe with the mice. One of the things I had Neil on to talk through world building. And he talked about how one of the very first images to come in is the little mouse against the wolf. Yeah, Ryan Panko's piece,

he just like totally nailed the vibe of the set in one go. Yeah, and how much did that influence, I mean, it's the image we showed people first, it very much sort of sets the tone for everything. It's interesting to me how early it happened. Yeah, big and small was like a major theme for the set. Yeah, I wanted to make sure that we got one image in at least very early on that kind of did the thing and that's the one. Chris Ron did a mouse later on too that's like, he's got a flaming sword that he's holding over his head and like there's basically like a big

snake coiling around. You don't even see the snake's head you just see like coils around this mouse in the dark. Yeah. And that one kind of like also does just it nails that like tiny heroism, the danger level that you normally want to see in a magic set stuff like that. Okay, so finally, animal wise, we have green blue, which is our frogs. What's the challenge of the frogs? Frogs? So like, Neil wanted to push them into like, augurism where like they were kind of like, they could always see the future and it was making them super depressed.

And that doesn't always like lend itself well to making fun pieces of art. But I think they ended up being a fan favorite for most of the people in the building that was coming by and seeing the frogs on the wall. There's just something super relatable about the personality that was coming through in the frogs. I just wanted to make sure that on top of whatever they're doing with their auger stuff that they could still have some like cool visual motiving to them. So and it was also just a great way to sell like the small scale of the set. So like all of their weapons have these like really awesome like magical splits in them where they're like connected by viscous water and stuff. And it was just a great way to like

sell small scale when you can see these like mega water droplets that are a little bit bigger than them. Okay, so we've talked about the animals. So let's talk a little bit about who the animals, the other side, the Calamity Beasts. So what were the challenges of designing the visually designing the Calamity Beasts? So Calamity Beasts had to be obviously like much bigger than the animal folk and they had to be like very potent looking, especially when you're decking out animals and armor, they have to look in sharp contrast and they weren't going anthropomorphic. So we had to do something where like we were doing basically doing regular animals but had to make them look interesting in some way. So we paired them off with elemental magical effects

pretty early on. And I forget if they even had that built into their creature type that they started out as elemental. I think that came after the fact. Yeah, that happened. When we handed off the set from Vision Design, they were called Predators at the time. And none of the Elemental, that all came during set design later on. And the Elemental got added.

That was a thing too. They all kind of started as Predators. And I was like, I don't know if we have necessarily enough Predators that are native to the eastern United States that we can make all these like giant animals out of so like I think it was a right creative decision to kind of like lean away from predator and just do big animal so then even if it was like something that was like a big herbivore like it could have some sort of elemental power that would make them dangerous regardless but we wanted them to look big and powerful and magical and like just kind of otherworldly. It came about like really on the like we didn't even know that if the magic that we were presenting them possessing was like a literal magic or if the animal folk were

simply perceiving them to be scarier than they were. But yeah, like I love the direction we ended up in. I think like just making them elementals and sort of pairing with game design really early on led to some like really interesting designs for the final card set. Yeah, no, they ended up really cool. Okay, next topic for you is, so one of the goals that was really early on is,

Magic is doing a lot of experimentation. We've done a lot of worlds that are pushing in different directions. And that one of the guidelines for this world was, hey, we wanna kind of reclaim fantasy. We wanna, we haven't done a straight up sort of high fantasy set. Let's make this a high fantasy set.

So what were the challenges of capturing the animal world, but still being high fantasy? I always like Magic Best when it kind of has like at least some form of high fantasy in it. Like I grew up with like Ice Age as my first set. So like I definitely have that like ingrained in my in my blood that like Magic has to have a certain look and feel. ingrained in my blood that like magic has to have a certain look and feel. I think it's more a case of like, how do we make this not look like a cartoon or too cutesy? Like how do we retain that magic the gathering feeling? So it had to have like a certain level of like danger that came across in the cards

more than anything else. Like we could do high fantasy, but we wanted to make sure that it didn't came across in the cards more than anything else. Like we could do high fantasy, but we wanted to make sure that it didn't just land in the same sort of like lighthearted space as Eldraine. So to me, like looking at the work I did on like adventures in the Forgotten Realms was actually a big driving factor. Just like having these animals form like adventuring parties and just like creating a sense of adventure in that way where like, yes, it feels very high fantasy,

but you'd also have this like element of danger that you don't normally would associate with tiny animals. Okay, the other thing that you talked about early on, I'm curious to get a little more, we talked about scope. The idea that just the nature of the world around this world was very different. You know, I mean, even though all the things we saw were things that actually exist in actual nature, not at the scope that you're normally used to.

So what were the challenges of sort of, you know, having giant blades of grass and like, how did you make, I'm sort of curious how you got that visual look. A lot of it was like the scale on the on the physical like the physics of the the elemental things more than the actual like trees and things but it was like a lot of like low-camera angles or setting things like as an animal would see them like but like as if you're looking at a scene through a blade of grass or something like that I tried to team with Neil to make sure that like a lot of the art descriptions were written as if you were watching like a nature show or like they take

like shots through trees and like up through water and stuff like that and then yeah it was just like mostly changing the scale of like the actual magic it's like fire is gonna behave entirely differently at a small scale than it than it would large Like you're just gonna get like big tongues of flame and only like one versus like many little ones Yeah, the one of the things that's been really nice is the audience is really the Just the look and feel the set. It's just been super, super popular. And there's some that the one thing that's nice is, it's nice when we go to a

world that just has its own sort of feel to it, but but but it feels very self contained within it, like nothing about the world feels very natural, even though we've never seen it before. Yeah, I can't wait to go back, honestly, like, I don't necessarily even think we need to like stick to the same biome the next time. Neil did a great job of like making sure that there were little tidbits that there is a world beyond valley. Like this could be potentially a very large expansive plane with like lots of things to explore and I think that's gonna

lead to a lot of like really like a create a gold mine later basically. Yeah, no it's a very expansive world and it's really cool. So we have a little bit of time left so I'm sort of curious is there any aspect that you really enjoyed in the art direction that we haven't touched upon yet? What anything that you did they, oh, this is a really cool part of making the visual look of Bloomberg. The constructs, like it was early on that we like, we realized that like animal folk, we're not gonna ride other animals

in any way, shape or forms, but we still wanted like knights riding on things and stuff like that. So like a lot of the visual solves we had to do for what they were gonna ride on in each of the Animal Folks case was definitely my fun, the part that I found the most fun just because of how much of a visual problem solving thing it had to be. So what were the challenges of doing constructs?

What were the challenges? Part of it was winning over game design because it was something that like wasn't necessarily built into the set was like well if we present these things like do we need cards for them but yeah was like each of the animal folk are different sizes too so it's like each one would potentially have a different solve to the thing that they would ride in like the raccoons got these like mobile living hedges that they would sit inside like when you see a whole raccoon family sticking out of a tree trunk and stuff like that and um and then like mice got like little wicker constructs that they would ride on um yeah it was just a lot of fun.

Yeah no no it turned out great. Well anyway I want to thank you so much for being with us it's always fun to talk art and I know the audience really every time I have an artisan, they really enjoy hearing all, like, I talk a lot about design, so it's fun to talk about just other aspects. So thank you for being with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on.

So anyway, to everybody else, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. Means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So once again, thanks for being with us and I'll see all of you guys next time. Bye bye.