My Little Titans, or Why I Shouldn’t Take Pony-Themed Commissions

For those who don’t yet know, I am a pretty geeky gal, having spent the past ten years co-directing the TempleCon retro-futurist gaming convention, the past four years as co-owner of The Temple Games store, and most of my life playing games and devouring science-fiction and fantasy literature and art. For nearly twenty years now I’ve played the collectible card game “Magic: the Gathering,” and in recent years there has sprung up a subset of Magic fandom that specializes in “altered art” cards, namely cards that have been painted or printed over the original art, either as an extension of the art already there or a complete replacement. I have dabbled in the former style of art alteration for the past few years now, but for a long time haven’t done anything new, primarily because I’ve been stuck on a set commission that I was probably crazy to have accepted.

A long-standing customer just happens to be a bit of a brony (a male fan of the “My Little Pony” cartoon), and he requested that a Magic card set of Titans be altered to look like ponies. Foolish me, I thought this would be a good creative challenge! But ponies really aren’t my thing (the awesomeness of Icelandic ponies aside), and even with the intention of using the pony theme as a springboard only rather than copying the ponies of the show, after I did the initial background modifications on these cards they sat on my painting board for months on end, taunting me with the worst case of artist’s block I have ever had. Finally, in search of inspiration I turned to the imagery of one of the fabulous artists who has appeared at TempleCon in the past, Heather Kreiter, who in addition to doing some lovely work on the game “Legend of the Five Rings” has also carved out her own niche in the world of pony fandom via her “My Little Demon” series. Thanks to Heather’s work, I finally managed to get the Frost Titan turned into a pony, but I honestly found the creature a little creepy…

…so it took a few more months before I could bring myself to touch the things again.

However, I am glad to say that my brony customer’s wait is finally over, as I recently pushed myself to get over my pony-intimidation and finish this set. While I am proud that at long last they are done and don’t look too terrible I don’t think it likely that I will be doing any more pony alterations in the future – these five were quite enough, thank you! And I am looking forward to finally getting back on the horse (pun not intended) with regard to my more usual style of card alterations – after seeing these, another customer has asked me to do a couple of non-pony alterations, and the customer who commissioned this set has requested a non-pony alteration as well. Still, I have to show these guys off, even if they aren’t really my thing. They turned out far better than I expected, and they’ve put me through enough trouble that I’d be remiss if I didn’t give them their day on my blog. 😉