Artist Interview with Heidi Taillefer

"There are certain similarities, certain differences. With Sorcery there's a lot more freedom than I expected there would be. There's a little bit of art direction, but for the most part we're given as much freedom as possible to do whatever we want, which is really liberating, because sometimes, direction can choke you. This was a little bit closer to the feeling of working in editorial illustration — they allow you to do more what you want, whereas in advertising there are really strict guidelines that you have to follow."

"The fan base is much different from the fine art world. In illustration, I didn't really have a fan base that I knew of. At least I did have a growing fan base in fine art. In the TCG world the art appreciation that I've noticed is off the charts, at least with Sorcery. And it's so refreshing to see that — I was at SorceryCon in Vegas last year, and it was just amazing to see how much people appreciate fine art in the game as opposed to using digital art, or AI. So yeah, I loved it."

"Yeah, I mean, and rightfully so, because it's richer, it's so much more interesting. And then there's a person behind it, so you can get to know the person. I just think it's a lot more interesting to use original art."

"It's hard to say. At the beginning when I first started with Erik, I was asking if I could use some of my fine artwork that was already done, and he said no — it needs to be more specific to a certain description, and so my paintings didn't necessarily have that exactitude needed for the game."

"So I started painting images, but I wasn't sure quite exactly how much of my own style I should put into them, and Erik was really encouraging me to use my own style, although sometimes it was hard to fit in. I had to reduce the size of the canvas, and then the detail in the image kind of followed suit. So there were fewer images that were like my style of painting. But I don't know if my work has changed so much — I feel like there's still a certain consistency. It's just been a bit challenging to incorporate my fine art style because the subject can have certain limitations."

"I guess maybe getting used to the format — the size of the image — and then getting used to working with Erik. At first I didn't realize that the full image could be shown on foil cards, and I was always framing it within the text boxes. Then I learned that he wants to see the whole thing. You learn how to work on the image so that it can be shown as a full art image."

"I think Gothic was tailor-made for me, totally tailor-made. Maybe my art has like a bit of an edge — a darker edge or something to it. But I was so excited working on the Gothic set. I don't know how many images are going to be included, but I know that it was a real pleasure to work on at least!"

Well, I could have painted it as like a robot sort of lying in the field, but it really was supposed to be a skeleton lying in a field of natural overgrowth — flowers and grasses and stuff. But then I was like, if I paint this and mechanize it, it had to be a full skeleton. It couldn't just be a skull. If it had been a close-up of a skull then it maybe would have allowed for a bit more play — I've done that before with skull close-ups with a glass dome, you see the brain inside. I did something for Forbes Magazine for a Richard Leakey article. He's a paleoanthropologist and they were digitizing human remains. That was a way I illustrated the digitization of technology and paleoanthropology.

Anyway, I was asked to do a full skeleton, and then I thought, if I mechanize it I don't want it looking like Terminator or anything, because it's supposed to be a return to nature. I don't want it looking like a return to Dystopian, techno, futuristic, or whatever. So that's why it ended up looking just like a real skeleton in a field of flowers.

"I think maybe the portraits — Sir Tristan and Sir Gareth. Those are my son-in-laws and I really wanted them to look like them. I had painted another one, Sir Lancelot, which I think might not be used in another set because it's too specific. It was my husband that I used for the portrait, but it didn't quite look like him, so I was a little disappointed with that one. It's a challenge to get the likeness of an individual into a portrait."

What happened was: I painted an owl, and because I did the bird series for AL, I had this texture background with the owl that looked kind of flat. My mom is an artist — mostly watercolors — and she had this textured painting where she took watercolor and added salt; it created these really interesting textures. So I scanned her painting and in Photoshop I superimposed the owl on top of her background, then darkened it and worked the image so it looked like a natural part of the background. And then it became a mother/daughter image in the end!

"No drastic changes, just minor tweaks. One example is Erik asked for more smoke in one of my images. Maybe I've been pretty lucky. But what I do is I provide a sketch — it's like a pretty clear sketch of what I intend to do, and then if I have any intention color-wise, I'll kind of give him a brief description of it, so that he knows."

They are progress shots. I don't think I've sold any, but I would be open to it.

"I think I would like to do a dragon. I know that I don't have any dragons in the AL set, but I'm like a huge fan. I took art lessons growing up — I never studied academically, but I did take once-a-week art lessons at this little local art school when I was 8 years old. They called me Dragon Lady because I was so fixated on dragons."

"One thing I would like to do is take a whole bunch of cards — like maybe 9 APs — and just put them together and do one image on the 9 cards so that it's like a puzzle. You put them together, and then you get the final image."

"As for Gothic, I'd have to go and look at my computer, but over 10 pieces. They were done at the end of last year. I haven't received commissions since then."