Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #865: Strixhaven with Taylor Ingvarsson

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

I sit down with Art Director Taylor Ingvarsson to talk about the art design of Strixhaven.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been using my time at home to interview people about making magic. So today I have Taylor Ingersoll to talk about art direction. And we're going to talk all about Strixhaven. Welcome, Taylor. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so I've talked a lot about Strixhaven from the mechanical side of things, but we've not talked a lot about the world-building

art side of things. So, let's start from the very beginning. What is the earliest memory you have of Strixhaven? Oh my gosh. Earliest memory I have of Strixhaven is people walking up and being like, this is gonna be a set about spells.

And my first thought was, holy cow, we make magic. How are we going to do this one? That sounds like a tall order, but it was also incredibly exciting. It was a big blue sky, open world to dive into. And it was a really fun challenge that was fun to sink our teeth into. So when did you first get involved? Like what's your earliest memory of what the world was? Earliest memory of what the world was was in early exploratory world building and vision design.

Sort of the enemy color pairs coming together. And essentially the top line was just that and that it was going to be a fantastical school about wizards. And that was about it. That was the little nugget where I came in. So one of the things that I know that happened a lot during vision design was the idea of making the school centered around a subject,

a school subject. One of the things that we're always trying to do when we make factions is make sure that we have an interesting take on them so we're doing something unique about them. And so I worked hard with Doug. Doug did a lot of the world building.

And you and he worked hand in hand, obviously. So real quickly, just so people might not realize this. So on the creative side of things, usually on a set, there is somebody who is in charge of sort of the words, if you will, and someone in charge of the pictures. And so the art director is in charge of like the visual look and who the artists are and all the sort of the visual side of things and then then the other person's in charge of sort of writing the world document and you know doing a lot of the world building for you know more of a a structural world building like what's the story and how does the world work sort of way yeah absolutely and doug is a fantastic partner to have on on the world side of things

and story side of things and i think something that was really incredible about this set in particular what makes a lot of our sets and the creatives so successful a lot of times is when the creative lead in this case doug and the art director myself myself in this case, work really well together. And info goes seamlessly back and forth. There's not really any walls set up like, no, I'm in charge of visuals. You don't touch them. We were having constant conversations about like, oh, what if this happened in the story? And then Doug would come up with some cool visual idea that was fun to play around with. And it was a nice sort of passing the ball back and forth uh i guess playing

playing catch making this set which was which was a ton of fun and those are absolutely my most favorite uh types of sets to work on is when just the both both sides of the creative jive really well together so as an example of that i want to talk about the five schools because i think that's a good example of what you're talking about, where there's a lot of sort of, okay, what are the, what exactly are they? And, you know, you, I, and Doug all spent a lot of time on, like, okay, the green-blue school, what is it? And we're like, well, it's the math school.

It's the school all, you know, and, like, what does that mean? What is math magic, you know? So talk a little bit about how, like, how you get a visual identity to sort of a concept of something. Yeah, so it's a really fun process because, like you said, it's just there is a subject in this case. Let's take Quandrix, for example, the math school that started out as just math. So it's not sort of like a, a oh i have this perfect little nugget of an idea and then it makes it to final like there are so many iterations and so many like whiteboard

sessions of what could this place be like uh you can't get too precious of a bunch of ideas super early because you're going to end up most likely throwing a bunch of them away or they're gonna morph in some way or another um quadrics uh is a great example because that one was really challenging um there were so many trope spaces that could potentially we could potentially fall into that could make this school not particularly interesting and something that's awesome about magic the gathering is that everybody gets to sort of be the hero be aspirational like if you're just kind of sitting in the corner like working on your equations like how do we visually make that look really expressive and really cool and um fractals came in um both as like a mechanical standpoint and just also I think this is something that's really cool when design and creative work really well together.

It's sort of like there's a mechanical space that plays pretty heavily into sort of a visual take or helps the visuals along. visuals along and that sort of replicating things and being able to make things bigger and build upon them um really led us into sort of this magical kind of plated glass repeating uh patterns and fragments of what creatures could potentially look like um with this particular sort of math magic if you will um something that was also really really fun and challenging about this set was taking a sort of school trope and making them work with kind of the enemy color pair of uh blue and green right like not necessarily always thinking the same way of doing things um blue is definitely a little bit more a little bit more heady and smarty with play styles and wanting to sort of get that across in the visuals.

And then green is also about nature and creatures, so we tried to find a cool, fun combo for both of those in the visual, which was a lot of fun and a really fun challenge for all of the colleges. So which college ended up being the biggest challenge for you visually? Visually, like, so every college ended up kind of shaking out. Even Quandrix ended up shaking out pretty well once we got rolling during the concept push. Surprisingly enough, Witherbloom,

trying to find a unique visual identity and motif to use throughout wither boom's college as far as like what the students outfits look like ended up being the biggest challenge which was which was really interesting kind of kind of threw me for a loop on the push as well as sort of just the challenge basis oh man what could this be like is it do we go with a super simple route of just what what's kind of expected with it it's sort of like this biology death magic um sort of life from death with a black green um we ended up sort of landing on kind of like this rib cage beaker combination to sort of hit both of those. That one was really fun,

but trying to find just that iconic motif that would go across the entire school and kind of end up branding it as its little icon, that one ended up being more of a challenge than I was expecting. Just so the audience realizes, when you are building a school visually, it means what do the students look like? What kind of things are in the school? What does the magic of the school look like? What does the familiar of the school look like? There's a lot of visual pieces that

have to all come together yeah absolutely like everything from large scale what does the campus and environments look like how does it feel to walk around within this place what are the students carrying what are they wearing why are they wearing it what justifies that about their type of magic and their environments that makes it feel like it makes sense why they would be wearing that within their college um and again with wither bloom is a super fun example of sort of like uh early on started out with sort of this kind of by you uh biology majors essentially um so we're thinking about kind of swamps and stuff but we didn't want it to feel dark and gross and and strange like you didn't want to go feel dark and gross and, and strange.

Like you didn't want to go there. We wanted all these schools to have a, a feeling that you, you wanted to go there. There was something about it that was so cool to you that you just had to go there. Um, and something with Withermoon that was super fun is a lot of their clothing

is sort of heavier and thicker and wearing gloves that have sort of like thick leathers and stuff because part of their deal and what fits in with the mechanical space uh with them as well as those those cute little creepy pest tokens so they're running around picking up all sorts of creepy little critters and to help use for their studies and like study them as well and those little pests are adorable but they're maybe they're gonna bite you or they those little pests are adorable, but they're, maybe they're going to bite you or they're a little like spiny so they're hard to pick up. So giving them like heavier, heavier equipment was, was something fun to play around with. It's like, well,

why do they have huge heavy leather gloves and boots? Oh, cause they're kind of trudging through this magical swamp. And there's these cute little critters around that could potentially poke you. So let's talk about pests for a second um for each school had a familiar but the the past the past are probably my favorite how did the past look come about the past look was was a lot of fun because it was like uh man we want to make these things cute but you end up kind of sacrificing these tokens and you don't want to feel so bad about doing it. So we had to give them a little bit of an edge

where they're like cute little jerks. And really the look for the PES was just kind of Doug and I riffing on what they could potentially look like. And then we brought in our amazing principal concept artist, Jay Han Chu, who just riffed on pests for like, there was like four pages of pest designs. And I think a majority of them made it into the world guide because not every pest is the same.

They all sort of maintain that cute little jerk vibe, but they all have their own little unique flair. And it was really like Jay Han's approach. He just had a, he had a solid click of what those things could look like, getting that cute and creepy vibe and making sure that they could be able to blep because you got to blep with those big old adorable eyes. But that was honestly like,

sometimes you just kind of knock it out of the park where it doesn't, it ends up not taking too much time. Something that you think could be a bigger challenge. You bring in an artist, uh, who just clicks with the subject matter and then you're off to the races, which was fantastic with, with these and exactly what happened.

Uh, Jay Hansen, a beast of an artist. So the, the, the college that I know we had on our side had the biggest trouble with, uh, was actually,

um, uh, the white, uh, the white black college um what is their name uh silver quill silver quill silver quill um talk about a little bit about silver quill how hard visually was it because mechanically we had all sorts of problems with them yeah Yeah, rhetoric is kind of like a tough visual to attack. A challenge visually for Magic and other card games is we don't really get the opportunity to show things in motion. We just get one frame. in motion like we just get one one frame right so we could do people like oh man these folks are really good at uh talking speaking rapping singing but when you depict someone singing on a card just kind of looks like someone's standing there with their mouth open which can look a little

awkward so we wanted to sort of like bring in a little bit more energy and movement to them. So as they are talking and writing, they're in motion, like their arms are in motion. They're actually physically kind of exerting themselves to perform their their craft and their magic. speaking or writing their inky tendrils flowing around them or uh their other their other pair white um sort of oh sorry live on a loud street uh like cool radiant magical wisps whipping around them as they're sort of can almost conducting their spell rather than just kind of standing at a podium and talking um so that was that was really like a fun college to take on and also sort of them being the kind of almost a little bit elitist in their in their approach to colors like they are correct in everything and we really wanted that to come across as well in

their dress like everything is clean cut really really, really awesome pleating and seams in their both in their clothing. All their hair is just done perfectly to a T with awesome lines. And just it's almost like someone crafted their look just out of it and really wanted to give them sort of like a high class appearance. So I want to ask a little bit, but they're familiar. So interestingly, in early design, it originally was a gargoyle. Okay. But I think it, so it got changed over to the inkling because they were just trying to make it feel more like, because the school was all about sort of language communication. And so how did the inkling come about? Remember the visual looks of the inkling, how that came about?

Yeah, it was, that was a really fun one too, because we were thinking again with this college, like how do you make writing look interesting? We got on the idea of a quill is a big part of their motif. And that sort of led us to kind of thinking about like what you would dip your quill into which is ink and then how does that look magically and came across like a bunch of different different ideas of how this creature could could come to be um and then i forget what meeting exactly but we landed on sort of the idea of riffing off of uh rorschach tests sort of this

just constantly moving ink you could see kind of what you needed or wanted to see throughout them and kind of use that as a jumping off point um for for the general look of the inklings and got a lot of really cool designs back based off those that again just like the pest sort of hit that like cute little jerk vibe like they are floating around they're sort of like all silver school quill students uh hype men and hype ladies like they're just pumping up pumping you up and uh getting you ready to do your spell as cool as you can and then maybe if you don't do so good maybe they'll, you know,

chirp at you a little bit like, man, you could have done that better. Get out of here. Inkling. Um, wanted that sort of like really kind of that, that when bringing a little bit of whimsy to,

to silver quill, cause they are so have the potential to be so rigid. Um, we wanted, we wanted the inklings to be able to bring in a little bit of that uh humbling humbling vibe to that college okay i'm gonna jump to another college now um all right so lorehold was the college where we deviated the most like we red white had hadn't really sort of mechanically gone in that space before. It was probably the color pair

that pushed the farthest away from where we'd been before. What were the challenges of Lorehold for you? Challenges for Lorehold? Similar with, like, all the colleges is professors, right? Like, historians. And classicallyically sort of, they're amazing to listen to, but visually not necessarily,

to potentially come across a little bit stuffy. And that was something that we, we, we wanted to avoid wholeheartedly with, with this college in particular. So red being added into that was a great help because Red is so kinetic and full of passion and exciting that we came across sort of the idea of like the adventure historian, the adventure spelunker. So sort of the history and motion type of deal.

Like you will, all these students can run into ruins and slide under, like, rocks that are falling above them, trying to crush them as they're just trying to capture a tome or pick up a piece of a sculpture or something to bring it back to their college to study. Something else that was really fun to play around with with this college was the idea that they could touch history like literally with their magic they can reanimate long lost statues of individuals who

have been gone forever and sort of possess a statue with a spirit to learn something um so potentially talk to mages or warriors from 300 years ago like hey how was that what did you guys do back then actually i'm having trouble on this test um so that was something that kind of was really facilitated also by the the spirit token which was an interesting challenge because they don't fly. So we wanted to bring in some weight and heftiness to this token to allow it to feel right that it couldn't fly away. So we thought about animating these crumbling or crumpled statues so that they could kind of drag parts of of their parts of their bodies well that sounded dark parts of their statues around so there was some physical contact with the ground um to help

us out with that so that was all these things are so much fun to work on and the the mechanical spaces always bring some some uh some fun challenges and multiple creatives bring fun challenges. So they're really, really cool to work on. Yeah, we had spirits very early because we loved the idea that if it was a magic school and you were learning history, well, why not just talk to the person that lived it? It seemed very cool.

Right, right, yeah. One of the big things that we were saying is one of my sort of pet peeves on magic schools is that they seem to study magic, but not actual classwork, you know? And I like the idea of our school, they use magic, but they're actually studying real things. You know, they're studying math or history

or actual subject matters. Yeah, absolutely. Sitting down in a classroom is something that we can all understand. That ends up like in the in the visuals and whatnot, can end up feeling a little sleepy. So pumping it up a little bit of what what makes this these colleges, like, we understand what they're doing, but what makes it like, oh, man, I wish I could have just summoned, you know, XYZ figure from history to help me out with that. That would have been great. Great. Okay, so we have one more college to talk about. Yes, sir. Prismari, our art school.

So what were the challenges with Prismari? Oh, man. Prismari. I think the challenge for me with Prismari was, I don't know, like feeling like maybe I'm not pushing this far enough. They're so like going to art schools and being around creatives all the time. They're so expressive, so passionate about everything. And that's incredible. And sort of how do we embody that in a visual look, right?

and sort of how do we embody that in a visual look, right? Like a lot of our kids don't necessarily like, or creatives don't necessarily care what anyone really thinks, but secretly they do. But they just want to be perfection at their craft and grow and learn and be better. So we wanted to kind of hit that dichotomy of blue and red in with water and just kind of this their their whole campus is almost like a massive art installation um which was really really fun to play around with especially with the with the elementals that they get to cast

those were ones that like we've done magic has done so many elementals in the past. It's like, how are these unique to Prismari? And we wanted to stick with kind of that, that constant battle between pure passion and control that Red White has so much fun to bring into it and how the elemental is kind of a constant, almost like a class project, like sculpture from one of these students of potentially how they're feeling at that time.

But Prismora, with all that passion and expression, was a lot of fun to play around with, with the students' costuming. They were very expressive um kind of almost leaned back into some victorian elements too of uh i always forget the name of these and i feel so bad because i should know the name of these i knew at one time but those little cloth poofs that uh come out around your neck and little ruffles in the fabric and playing with almost more of like a ballet approach to their movements and their spell casting. Just everything was very, very artful and expressive in how they cast, how they present themselves,

and how they learn. Really fun. Okay, so now that we've talked about all five of the colleges, we'll talk a little bit about the college in general. Like, for example, the library, right? That was sort of the centerpiece of the campus. How did that come about? Yeah, the biblioplex was, the idea sort of was just that

there is a library in a place that is so massive and so mystical that it holds essentially all of the knowledge of the plane and kind college be closed off you need to get like a uh like a hall pass or a library pass or something to go in and then we ended up landing on no we wanted all of strixhaven to feel welcoming um if you if you made it into the school like almost nothing was off limits to you so that allowed us to kind of play with massive uh overarching doorways and entryways into the biblioplex and within it's just kind of like layer upon layer um of scrolls and tomes and books and all sorts of other texts uh to try and find whatever spell you're studying or needing um it's it's really easy to find the biblioplex the overall layout of strixhaven is sort of a massive star um and from each from each uh point of the star like leads you through massive pathways and these awesome big torches called the torches of

enlightenment that'll bring you straight to the biblioplex. So the biblioplex is essentially at the heart and center of Strixhaven because it's the center of learning. Get it? Okay, so you talk about the spell. So I'm going to segue into the Mystical Archive, which represents sort of all the spells sitting there in the library.

From an artist's standpoint, what was the take on the Mystical Archive? That has a very distinct artistic sort of quality to it. Yeah, so Mystical Archive, the look for that was, or the idea for the look of that was essentially

in-world, what you would find within the text or in a massive tome for the particular spell you were looking for on strixhaven so that was that was kind of the the jumping off point of that and we landed on kind of this kind of started as a little bit of an illuminated manuscript but then merged into something a little bit more fantastical so that it didn't feel too rooted in real life. But that was the general idea, was there are a collection of spells from the multiverse,

essentially the most powerful spells, and if you found them, this is what they would look like as a student researching them in Strixhaven. So I wanted to talk a little bit about, so when you assign an artist to do something, we give them what we call an art description, which is sort of, here's what the spell's about. And sometimes it's more spelled out the image we want. Sometimes it's more left up to the artist. So like the mystical archive to me is a little more looser, right?

Where a lot of times we're more exact on like, it's a kill spell, so you have to see someone being hit by a lightning bolt or something. Yeah, the mystical archive and takes on art like that are a little bit more unique. A little bit, the description is crafted a little bit differently than say a normal, um, art concept, like for, for a general art description, like we get, it's sort of the prompt, almost the, uh, the, the instruction booklet for what we would like to accomplish kind of like, what's the vibe of this overall goal for this card. And then, um,

it allows enough flexibility most of the time for the artists to bring in their own voice to to every piece that we do um some are more specific than others and we also have them a massive hundred hundred plus page um sometimes multiple hundreds of pages of a world guide document um that has all the things that that we want to see in this world in there. For the mystical archive, it really leaned on sort of that central vision for what we wanted those to look like visually. And then Doug, who wrote all the concepts, sort of crafting those ideas around the vibe of the spell with kind of this visual take in mind and then

tom jencott the art director for the mystical archive um she did an incredible job both those guys did amazing work on the mystical archive it's so cool um would would take that and just communicate back and forth the vibe of what we're looking for and the artists that were targeted for that were felt that they could actually bring that vision for what we wanted from the mystical archive uh to life which is which is always super fun so i'm i can see my desk from here so i'm almost to work um any any final like any visual things we didn't talk about, like anything that you're really proud of from Strixhaven that we haven't touched upon yet? I think just the overall tone of Strixhaven, I think, hit really well. Like it is, there's a lot of serious themes in there, but it also kind of has a lighthearted welcome to school vibe in like a really, really fun, cool and unique way that we haven't seen done before in

other expressions of wizard school and it felt uniquely magic which was something that i think all of us should be super proud of um everyone who worked on it which is a ton of people um and then also just every college really getting its own unique look. There's definitely no mistaking if you're looking at someone from Silverquill or Lorehold, even though they both share white. Or if you're looking at someone from Witherbloom or Silverquill again, because they both share black. It was really a fun challenge to be able to express enemy colors within or opposing colors within each college themselves. But then how does the same color differentiate between other colleges? It was sort of a unique puzzle that was incredibly fun to figure out and sort of workshop together with the team so yeah i i agree that one of the things that i was really happy with

when like i was very involved early on on getting us to do you know like getting us to do this set right this was one of the sets that i i pushed real hard to do and it's really fun to me when we take sort of trope space but find like magic's version of it like I feel like we made a school look there's been there's lots of magical schools you know in pop culture and stuff

and but I feel like we made magic's version of it in a way that's really it's not like anybody else's version you know what I'm saying I mean there's obviously overlaps

in the tropes but you know it really was uniquely our own. And I think especially visually, that was awesome. That's something that I really appreciate about the set. Yeah. No, I couldn't be happier with the set.

And I'm excited. And I hope that the world loves it, too. It seems like people do. But that's something that's always nice after the fact is it's like, oh, man, people really like the set. Oh, gosh. It gives me the warm and fuzzies. Amazing. Well, I mean, it sold very, very well and the

surveys came back very well. From all our metrics, the people that did enjoy Strixhaven. That's great. I love it. Well, thank you. I want to thank you, Taylor. I've made it to my desk, so we need to wrap up. But I want to thank you for joining us and've made it to my desk, so we need to wrap up.

But I want to thank you for joining us and sharing us. I talk about the design part all the time. We don't get to hear about the visual component nearly as much. So it's great to hear that perspective. Well, thanks for having me on, Mark. This was a ton of fun. I really appreciate it. And good luck getting to your desk. I know it's treacherous going from one spot of that room to the other spot.

Well, everybody, now that I'm at mydask, 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 I want to thank Taylor for joining us. Thank you. And for all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.