Hey all! Super excited to be able to finally share this painting for Estrid, the Masked. She's my first Planeswalker and I was stoked to not only get to paint her, but also her accompanying spells and aura, and, most importantly, completely design her from scratch.

Being an enbantress, I wanted the overall design motifs to reflect both her ability to change things, and her color identity, which led me to the butterfly/rorschach motifs. I also wanted a female personality, rather than another iteration of the hot action girl that's too often the "strong" female character in mainstream entertainment - so she's a bit older, barefeet, pretty short haired and hopefully wise and enigmatic without "sexy" enigmatic (which I thought didn't really fit here). Mark Winters and Kelly Digges were a huge help with their art direction.

The environment was a change for me - I usually make no distinction between the figures I paint and the scenery they're in, and try to make it feel as immersive as possible, but here I wanted the surroundings to feel otherworldly and perhaps a bit disconnected - a bit more like an illusion that she builds, rather than a candid shot of her in a real world.

If you're interested in prints of this, or any of my other paintings (yes, even Gift of Orzhova), I just launched a Kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/a…