Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #811: Mark Tedin

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

In this podcast, I interview longtime Magic artist Mark Tedin.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So I've been doing lots of interviews while I've been stuck at home, but I've not interviewed a lot of artists. I technically did interview Macavata, but here's my first artist who is just an artist and doesn't do other stuff and is an artist. So Mark Tadine is with us. So welcome, Mark Tadine. Good morning. Or afternoon. Or afternoon. Mark Tadine is with us. So welcome, Mark Tadine.

Good morning. Or afternoon. Or afternoon. Wherever you are. Okay, so I wanted to start from the very beginning, which is how did you first learn about magic? Well, I first learned about magic from, it was actually Anson Mannox. I was working, I had just moved to Seattle,

and we had been working on the role-playing game for Wizards of the Coast, which was Talos Lanta. And it was one of the first things I was working on commercially. In fact, I had done a sketch or two for the then art director while I was still going to school in St. Louis, or I should say after I was going to school. while I was still going to school in St. Louis,

or I should say after I was going to school. And I had just moved to Seattle, started doing some work for that role-playing game, and only a couple of months later, in either November or December, did the Magic Project come down the pipeline. What year is this? What year are you talking about? Oh, this was in 1992.

92, okay. Yeah, November or December of 1992 was when we first got, you know, the pitch from Jesper Miraforce. So what did you, tell me the pitch. What did Jesper tell you? What were you doing? Well, Jesper was, you know, of course, he's very excited about, like, you know,

the project in general. We had done a few things for Talos Lanta up until that point. And then he said, you know, this is, you know, this is a pretty incredible game. And he showed me like, you know, probably at that point, some prototypes using some copy paper and, and cartoons just, you know, grabbed from all over the place, like Calvin Hobbes, some fantasy artwork. And he said, you know grabbed from all over the place like calvin hobbs uh some fantasy

artwork and he said you know isn't this just the most incredible thing you like you uh you play against each other and you know you've got these small little bits of artwork and um it's a very interactive game and very fast very um if i can say the word, maybe Twitch, you know, compared to like role-playing games, which are by their nature, very slow, deliberate, but Magic the Gathering sort of requires a more fast paced approach. And from an art standpoint, what were you told? Like what did they need? Well, at the very beginning

when, at least when Gester was assigning the artwork, they were generally just one word art descriptions. Just the title of the card. Beyond the color and the basic mechanic of that card, it would just be whatever the title was implying. So there wasn't actually a lot of specific description like there is nowadays, when you can receive an entire style guide or a description that was, you know, paragraphs long. Often it was just the title, you know, I'd receive, you know, a sphere of annihilation, for example, which was actually,

you know, based on another property. So of course it was renamed, but it was the flavor of the idea that would just sort of spark an image. And the image was done rather, you know, relatively simply. Often it was one object with one simple background. So are you talking about Neverall's disc? No, Sphere of Annihilation was renamed into Chaos Orb. Oh, Chaos Orb, Chaos Orb, okay. So all the sketches that I have just say Sphere of Annihilation. Okay.

And I didn't realize it was actually another property, Sphere of Annihilation. Okay. And I didn't realize it was actually another property, Sphere of Annihilation, until I was listening to Will Wheaton's reading of Ready Player One, and he casually brought up Sphere of Annihilation in regards to I think it was a video game of some kind. And I was like, wait, what did he

say? Did he say Sphere of Annihilation? And then I realized it was from something else uh the same thing went with uh with um lord of the pit was originally just nicknamed balrog so i gave across something that was uh very loosely based on tolkien but um uh it wasn't the you know the same look but it had the same atmosphere. So real quickly, just for the audience, so you were one of 25 original artists,

so Alpha had 25 artists on it, and you did, by my count, 16 cards from Alpha. 16 cards, yes. So Circle Protection Red, Wall of Swords, Brain Geyser, Time Twister, Lord of the Pit, Fireball, Wall of Wood, Chaos Orb, Helm of Chatswick, So what was your favorite of your alpha cards? The favorite of the alpha cards, at least early on,

perhaps was Chaos Orb and Lord of the alpha cards, at least early on, perhaps was Kias Orb and Lord of the Pit. I think Lord of the Pit may have, or Helm of Chatsuk, may have either one have been the first magic card that I worked on. I'm not sure which one I worked on the sketch first or which one was the one that I finished painting. Lord of the Pit was a little bit of a visual holdover from Talos Lanta because people are always asking about what that little symbol in the corner was. And I just tell people, I don't know. It was meant to look like a chapter head of some sort of arcane book. And perhaps this is like, you know, this creature's family crest.

And I had done that with a role-playing game, and it just was one of those things that carried over. So I'm going to ask you about a few other of your cards, just because some of your cards are very, very iconic magic cards. So Neverall's Disc. Do you remember anything about doing Neverall's Disc? Yes, I do. And I remember getting, like, you know, the art descriptions,

or I should just say the titles of the cards, over the phone with, I guess, from Air Force. And he would just go down the line of all the cards, at least all the cards that had been grabbed by somebody else he had talked to previously. And I would just go, oh, that sounds interesting. Check me out for that one. We'll come back to it. sounds interesting. Check me out for that one. We'll come back to it. And through the process of elimination, we actually settled on a couple of cards that

generally leaned towards red and black, I think, early on. A lot of artifacts just because they sounded interesting. So that was pretty much the way I had picked those early ones. And do you remember the drawing of Neverall's desk?

Do you remember what inspired that art? Oh, sorry. Yeah, the Neverall's desk, he had just said the name Neverall's desk. And I didn't know what he was talking about. He said it was something that was like, you know, summoning a creature. So I had a pendant with a little creature coming out of it.

When I actually saw the card printed, either someone told me or I realized that it was an anagram of Larry Niven. And Larry Niven was the science fiction author of Ringworld and all those properties. And I realized that I'd missed a little bit of an opportunity to do something that was teleportation based. Because Larry Niven's discs would have probably been close to transporters in the far future. And I could have done something that

could have looked like that, but it is what it is, and I was very pleased to see that Larry Niven had actually signed some of those cards themselves at conventions. And I was just thrilled. Okay, another card, another very

famous card of yours, Sol Ring. Do you remember the making of Soul Ring? Yes. I'm trying to think if that one was actually named something else. I think it may just have been Soul Ring. So I was probably coming up with like, you know, a good page and a half of sketches. And I wanted to come up with something that was very very much tied to you know a sun itself and not so much like a hard um artifact like you know i think a lot of like you know soul rings have been reinterpreted uh as like you know these things you can either hold or have in front of you. But I thought an interesting idea for an artifact would just be something stellar in size. So if you've ever seen scientific, like, you know, images of the sun, usually there's a loop coming off of it, a prominence as they call it.

And it would be interesting if like, you know, that loop had disconnected and actually formed a ring and just had become its own, um, its own self-sustaining, um, magical effect. And if that could be considered an artifact, well then all the better. I had done it with, you know, pretty fast. It was just done with like probably three colors of watercolor, you know, with the canvas that was, you know, very, very damp. So I was getting all these sort of random effects in watercolor and I was playing with it and it was very a very fast but uh um I thought it was very effective

and the original itself was actually uh rather luminous looking how how big how big were the people understand how big were these illustrations uh these were all five by seven uh five inches by seven inches approximately uh there was many reasons for that. First off being that I think it was much simpler to scan and not tile together in Photoshop. So it was a lot easier for the art director to either scan it or store it or reduce it to another size when it was being processed afterwards.

So all those originals are relatively sort of small. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that the pictures are actually, a lot of them are much, much, much smaller than they think, the originals of them. Yeah. Nowadays, I mean, there's a lot of them that have this implied detail. But if you saw the original, you could probably spot where things are starting to like, you know, break down, which is why like some of those original pieces, anytime I see them, like blown up to a large size,

I wince a little bit, because you can see like the pencil marks, you can see like, you know, where there is lack of detail, because again, this is only five by seven so if you've got somebody in the background with like you know a hand um you know maybe they're missing fingers maybe they're not uh i think one example would probably be uh time twister time twister uh i thought like the the main character's face was a little on the undetailed side. But if you're scaled down to a card which is one-third the size of the original, it's not really noticeable. But if you blow it up to poster size, it's very noticeable. So what inspired Time Twister? What got you to do that

pose? I had probably done, again, a number of sketches, and I was having a hard time thinking of how to get across the idea of time being distorted.

So I just kind of fell back onto having two characters in a place reacting to some sort of time-twisting event. On the right, there's somebody casting the spell, probably drawing power from something that looks like a timepiece, and the effect, which is this person's armor being aged and starting to disintegrate. So if it was a little more abstract, I think it would have been more difficult to get it

across, but I wanted to sort of tell the story that someone was being adversely affected by something called a time coaster. Okay, so the one last alpha card I want to ask about, just because this is another very iconic image from you. Winter Orb. What inspired Winter Orb? Yes. Again, that was another case where I could have just had one object in the middle. A wooden sphere is a little bit like that. Of course, a chaos orb is also a spherical object.

I did the same with a dark sphere as well. But I didn't want it to be as much of the focus. I wanted the effect of the winter winter sphere or sorry the winter orb um to be in the center and so that is probably why people think that uh that the um the polar bear the poor polar bear in the middle is the central to the story but i just did it for compositional purposes um the winter orb is something that causes a lot of destruction you you know, as the corpses of these poor polar bears. I seem to have like this thing against polar bears in the first couple of sets, but that's just by accident. So it's a bit mysterious, you know, why this Winter Orb is so destructive.

But I have done alternate, like I have done alternate takes on the object itself, actually sort of popping claws like Wolverine out of its side. A little bit like a drone that has claws coming out of it as well. Okay, so I'm going to move on to some

other iconic art you've done later on. I'm going chronologically here. So the next piece is from Arabian Nights. So this is another super iconic piece of yours, Juzam Jin. What inspired Juzam Jin? Well, I had thought of the sketch that I had done that I sort of gravitated towards was just a simple genie that had massive horns coming out of his

head. And I think that originally, because I didn't want it to look too much like darkness from the movie Legend, that I would remove his nose. So he actually had a little bit of a nose that resembled Voldemort's.

And of course he was holding someone who had summoned him by the scruff of his neck. And he was like, you know, having a very intimidating conversation, you know, with him. By the way, that is also a card that if you focus on that little guy's hand, it just totally breaks apart. So if you scale that piece of artwork up, I would kind of go, oh no, oh no, that doesn't really work.

But it's one of my favorite cards. People seem to think it's an early iconic image. I think one of the early video games actually had it on the, it's cover. Yeah, it did. Okay. Next,

uh, we'll jump to legends, uh, mana drain and other, uh, very famous card that you illustrated. Yes. Mana drain.

Was that from the dark or was that from legends? It was from legends. That was from legends. Okay. Yeah. Um, and then you also, uh, re you in. And then you also, in Time Spiral, you had a card

that you sort of made homage to it. Yeah, the little shrimp. So what inspired Mana Drain? How did you... Well, that was another card that was going to be very difficult because, you know, early on

the idea of mana, like, hadn't been sort of hashed out what that would look like beyond, like, you know, just, like, the five colors. to imply that something was pulling power from another color. So it had something that was like red that was also pulling something out of something that was red, which in this case could have been an undersea mountain or volcano, hence the lava. And by the way, he's got five tentacles poking in, which could perhaps imply that,

or at least refer to the pente, the five colors. Yeah. Ahead underwater, which was blues and greens. I guess not so much of green, but you've also got white light coming from above. So I was trying to include the not so much of green, but you've also got like, you know, white light coming from above. So I was trying to include like the colors of the mana, but the specific,

one kind of specific mana wasn't really there. So it's not so much about the creature, but rather what it is drawing from, or what sort of like, you know, land it is drawing from. So one of the things that's interesting for artists is how you don't know when you draw, like, what's going to end up being the popular cards, right? Because it has a lot to do with what the card is versus what the art is. Yeah.

Is it, I mean, Juzamjin, for example, you like the art a lot and went on to be a really big card. It's nice when those two overlap. Well, I'm trying to remember. Does Jusamjin have, like, a particular power that made the card sort of attractive to the players? Yeah, yeah. At the time, it was a very powerful creature.

We've made creatures much more powerful. It's nowhere near as powerful as it once was. But in its day, it was a very powerful card. Okay, so now I want to jump ahead to Ice Age. So, by the way, you've illustrated, by my count, 189 cards. Is that close to right? It could be, actually. I'm not sure, like, which ones are repeats,

but I thought it was at somewhere upwards of almost or around 200. Well, also, this is only stuff that's out, so you also might have done some stuff that isn't public yet. Right, that's true. Okay, so the next one I want to talk about is another super iconic piece of yours, Necropotence. Necropotence, yes. So what inspired Necropotence? Well, I remember when I received the assignment or assignments for Ice Age,

I had done quite, you know, quite a few cards like in, you know, some of those early sets. But Ice Age was one that I had done at least was it 1911, 11 cards for. So besides like, you know, Alpha, it was one of those sets that I had done a lot more. And part of the assignment had sort of overlapped into, I think,

a trip that many people who were working at Wizards were going to the first toy fair in New York City. I think it was called the New York Toy Fair? Yeah, New York Toy Fair. Yeah. And I was really excited to go, but I had deadlines, so I had to stick to those deadlines. And I remember taking at least a batch of cards to finish relatively fast.

And I think it was Necropotence, Naked Singularity, and Nacre Talisman, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. to finish you know relatively fast and i think it was uh necropotence naked singularity and nacre nacre talisman if i'm pronouncing that correctly um and i had um i had to finish that in the hotel when i first arrived in new york it was my first trip to new york city and i was excited to get out there and go see things but I had this deadline so I think for a good 48 hours I was trying to fiercely finish painting those three cards. So Necropotence was done as simply as I could do. It was, again, a relatively small image, 5x7. But I think I ended up doing it with watercolor,

a little bit of gouache, and there's even a little bit of ballpoint pen in there. Interesting. You can probably see it when it's blown up, fairly large. I wouldn't recommend doing something like that again, but I was actually pretty pleased at how the final turned out

because I was able to put specific tones and details in with a medium that was probably I probably wouldn't do it the same way nowadays, but there was a sketch in you know, in the sketch phase,

you know, before I'd come to New York, I was having a hard time coming up with an idea that would sort of encapsulate the idea of powerful death, which the name implies. So I ended up at first having what would be considered maybe a reverse wake there were all these sort of Harry Potter like candles floating in mid air

and what looked like these zombies raising the dead from this crypt I didn't think it sort of sold the idea well enough, faster enough. So in this case, I just put a skull with some power emanating from his hand.

And I thought that sort of got the idea across a little faster, a little better. Yeah, also, that's another card where you got to do another version of it. In Unhinged, we had Necro Impotence. And we had you do... Do you like doing parodies of your own stuff? Is that fun for you? Oh, I love it. That was a fun one to work on.

The Unhinged and some of the Unsets were fun because you get to sort of uh um uh yeah you parody like you know your own work because you know i don't take my work extremely seriously uh so uh in that case i just had like you know the the sense that like you know his power was failing and i could put like a symbol on his forehead that had a, like a, what was it, the symbol for male in Greek. Ah, okay. My head sort of like bending down. So I don't want to make it, you know, too offensive to like people of all ages, but

I thought I got across the idea of the power of death, but it was failing a little bit. So at this point, just a little background for the audience, you and I actually worked together because you came to work for Wizards for a little while. Yes. So let's talk about that. So you joined, basically,

Michael, Ryan, and I had pitched the Weatherlight Saga, and they put together a team, our very first world-building team, Michael, Ryan, and I had pitched the Weatherlight Saga, and they put together a team, our very first world-building team, essentially. And you and Anson, and everybody, but anyway, you guys came in and you guys were off in Siberia, I think that's what we called the room,

and you guys were, you designed, it was for Tempest Block, right? That's the, you guys sort of built the world of Wrath. Yeah, yeah. Then it started like in 97. Yeah, right after Weatherlight, I don't think that Homelands was included with that concepting.

But, you know, starting with like, you know, Urza's Saga. I think it was Urza's Saga. Well, Tempest was the first set. I think you guys came in and you built Wrath, which was in Tempest. Oh, that's right. Tempest was the first one. It was Tempest, and then you were there through Urza's Saga block. So what was that like, working at Wizards?

Well, it was like the first time that I had done a concepting push. In this case, it was a concepting push that, you know, had, that stuck around for like a, for a few years. I had to sort of scale back the number of cards that I had, that I had done for the sets. But at the same time, I got to formalize a lot of the world building. And so I worked with, with Anson Mannix, my good friend. Anthony Waters, a fabulous visual designer, came on a little bit later, but we had started with the core group under Jesper, with Matt Wilson, Anson, myself. Later, they brought on Dave and Chippy, myself. Later they brought on Dave and Chippy, who's Brian Dugan and Dave Alsop,

for a lot of the Phyrexian designs because they had sort of, they had, you know, for the first time tried to nail down what Phyrexia was, even though there were a few references before. even like, you know, my, uh, what was it? For example, priest, um, there really, really wasn't a, um, um, uh, sort of a, a locked down vision of like, you know, what machine and like flesh was supposed to look like. So they did a great job of, uh, of, of hammering that out. Uh, Sam would, um, Matt Cabato, uh, a little bit later Todd Lockwood, and a few other people came on like you know in the ensuing years at what they originally called Spine Design, almost like a sort of a design group within Wizards of the Coast. And yeah, we worked in an area called Siberia after we quickly realized that working in the cubicles with a lot of the other people

was just going to be too distracting. It was good to put us in a room where we could just feed off of each other's ideas and take a look at what each of us was doing. So we put together style guides, tried to formalize what the look and feel of magic was, at least from that point on. It's a lot more streamlined nowadays. The style guides don't ramble on as much as we probably had done early on.

the stock guides don't ramble on as much as we probably had done early on. But, you know, we went into, you know, all the story meetings with you guys. We tried to hammer out ways of converting, like, a storyline into visual ideas and making them recognizable, you know, based through color, the colors of magic, you know, the creature types. I think earlier, like, the look and feel of, like, you know, certain creatures like goblins needed to be sort of hammered down. So there were you know it was

it was all over the place but it was a lot of fun because the end result was that magic had been you know sort of transformed visually

into something that was more amenable to a consistent storyline yeah I mean that was the first time that we really had a

consistent look and feel like one of the things you guys did also is you did all the character work, right? The Weatherlight crew had a cast, and you guys, like, did you design Karn? Was that your design? Karn was my design, yeah. So when I got all the teasing for, like, the way that I had done Karn for one of the more recent sets, I think it was Double Masters, of last year. I was thinking, well, hold on.

I actually did the first version of him. Maybe I brought too much of his early look into the artwork. But he was a fairly mopey character. Sort of the Eeyore of the group. a fairly mopey character. Sort of the Eeyore of the group. So having him express any sort of emotion, I guess was a little too shocking for some people.

Yeah. So we're almost out of time here. I'm almost to my desk, if you will. So looking back, you've done over 200 magic cards. So earlier on, you said one of your favorites was Juzamjin. Is that your all-time favorite illustration you've done, or is there another one that's your favorite magic illustration? The all-time?

I'm not sure. I mean, there's a lot of them that I found it was a lot more fun to paint it. Leviathan was also a good one just because it came out, you know, how I'd sort of pictured it. But, I don't know, Emmerich Hall was an early favorite because I had, it was one of the first pieces I had done

that was sort of on the larger side. How big was the illustration? I think it was like 11 by 17 or 11 by 14. Oh, wow. That is big. Well, at the time, it was me scaling up the work because, like I said, I was doing all those five by seven images and probably some eight by tens. But doing a larger piece was something that I hadn't really tackled before.

So one last card I like, just because it's a very beautiful card and there's a lot of detail in it. The Antiquities War. Sorry, the Antiquities War? Yeah, it's the saga that's vertical. Oh, sorry, sorry, yeah. Actually, I've got it here in the studio.

So how did that one come about? Because that is, there's a lot in it. If you really look closely, there's a lot going on. Yeah, yeah. The art director wanted me to sort of return back to the design sort of feel of like the Urza saga. And I was pulling, I designed Urza in some of his early accoutrements, although it has, it has been updated to serve, um, some of the, uh,

updates of are sort of showing up as the, uh, as the, uh, automaton, like at the bottom of the, the screen. Um, but I got to sort of, uh, have a depiction between like, a depiction between the two brothers, all their mechanisms that they commonly use, and also to depict the Soul Stone. I think it was the Soul Stone. Sorry, the Weak Stone and the... Mind Stone, yeah. Yeah, the Mind Stone. Being that first singular look. I don't think it had been depicted consistently. You know, it always sort of varied,

kind of like Sauron's ring from something you hold in your hand to the size of a skull. So in this case, it's just them, you know, about to pry it off using, like, these different mechanisms that sort of show the style of both Urza and Mishra. So any final memories? I mean, you've worked, like you and

I, actually you've worked on magic longer than I've worked on magic because I've only worked on magic for 25 years. Do you have any favorite memory? What is your, when you think back to your many, many years of working on magic, what is your favorite memory? A favorite memory, of course,

is just meeting a lot of the other artists who I admire tremendously. Not everybody lived in the same area, but quite a few did. Quite a few who had gone to school at Cornish. Julie Barrow, of course.

And getting to work with my best friend since childhood, Anson Maddox. When the game had just started, you know, even before it had come out, I have a fond memory of painting on Anson's apartment floor, trying to, like, you know, crank out as many images as we could within the deadline given to us. You said that I had done 16 pieces for Alpha. Yeah. Anson had actually done 30.

Wow. One reason was that I think there were some cancellations or changes at the last minute, and usually Jesper Mehrfors would give those to um those last minute changes to anson and uh he would uh just knock them out of the park and it was a very heavy time you know our first one of our first sort of commercial jobs uh for a role-playing game company um and um uh it was just it's been a wild ride since then. And it never, it never fails to amaze. And, uh, um, and, uh, no, that's, that's it.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's interesting, so according to my research here, there's only three artists, you, Ron Spencer, and Rob Alexander that worked at the beginning of magic that still now, you know, do, do art. And so, uh, you, you, I mean, it's funny that, uh, you really are one of the sort of the, the, the, the marathon runners of magic art that have, that have, uh, gone the distance for a long, long time. Yeah.

Uh, I think that Mark Poole is also like one of those, uh, really early artists that, uh, that still, you know know do some some really nice work well that is true i had taken sort of a break uh um for you know a few years um i didn't uh get the call like uh for a while but um uh over the past like you know a few years you know doing either some reboots of old artwork um you know redoinging the soul ring in a way that sort of harkened back to the original card and doing it in a new way. It gives you a chance to grow, and I'm very thankful for that.

Well, I want to thank you for being with us. This has been very fun. I like the interviews showing off lots of different parts of magic. So it's really fun to show off the art side of it because that's a big, big part of the game. And, you know, you've been part of the art since the beginning. So thank you for being with us.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me on. And everybody stay safe out there. So guys, I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So thank you so much, Mark. And everybody, I'll see you all next time.