FanArt_ink.Gigantic

MTGinktober towers forth to Day 10, "Gigantic," starring Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and William "Huey" Jensen, and guest starring the squirrel from the Urza's Legacy version of Might of Oaks!

Rather than draw some literally yuge creature from Magic's history, I wanted just to do a regular old portrait of William Jensen since he's famously quite tall and just recently with his Worlds 2017 win, he's also now considered definitively one of the top 5 greatest players of all time. His interviews in Enter the Battlefield have also always been quite interesting to me, so this felt like a great spot for a picture of him. But then again a plain portrait started feeling a little uninspired.

Thinking back to BFM's classic use of gigantic creatures as trinkets to show scale, I decided to do something similar. So I used the biggest raw creature, the 15/15 Emrakul, as a pocketpal. I considered something involving Sphinx's Revelation from his signature Blue-White take-forever-but-inevitably-win deck from the Return to Ravnica days, but that didn't feel like it communicated scale quite as well rather than the Emrakul/Squirrel route. For added yumor, I added the Might of Oaks reference in the background to show how even that giant thing gets dwarfed. This was also a bit of a one-up on the last subject I used Might of Oaks with, but that's another story!

Fun Facts: I seem to draw something Peach Garden Oath-related every Inktober. 2015 was Owen T and 2016 was the mini-portraits of the PGO.

Easter Eggs: Just behind the Might of Oaks reference is a reference to John Avon's "Green Mountain" from Mirage.

I was nervous making this drawing not only because portraits are always tough--and particularly challenging for this portrait was that he's much more in shape in recent years, but my reference photos were mainly from when he looked a bit different, so it was a challenging back-and-forth between outdated and updated features--but also because MTGinktober gets more eyeballs than I normally get, so rather than just drawing for whomever happens to be passing by, it feels like I am putting on a high-wire show for (specifically) Magic fans, with no safety net. And I'm pretty sure this one's a splat.

Not normal,

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