MTGinktober blazes toward Day 22, "Trail," starring Jaya Ballard, Task Mage and Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh, aka Proto-Chandra and Kid Chandra! Chandra's on the run, on the open road, unknowingly on a trail blazed by the black-clad Ballard, bygone eras before!
This was a nightmare to draw! I missed my alarm clock, so I had to race to get this drawn, hence its relative simplicity. But in order to give an otherwise straightforward image of a firey-fingered femme fatale some flair, I thought I'd pull the old portal trick and play with the common knowledge that Chandra is basically Jaya but for the fellow young people. The nightmare portion of the program came from when I was already at my pencils deadline and needed to move to inks, but I noticed the arms were way too big--you can see remnants of where I kept bringing in the arms and elbows with each frantic revision. Once I got the arms to a reasonably passable position, I then noticed the hands were also out of proportion. Since the hands were so complex, I had to try my best to preserve them, otherwise I'd never make final deadline. So just before inks, I took them in just slightly while keeping their general positioning and while inking, I favored the inner side of the linework.
Back to the composition, to help sell the parallels these two Planeswalkers possess, I wanted to arrange them such that their placement indicated that Chandra was following in Jaya's footsteps, on a trail the elder pyromancer blazed, as it were. The story in my head here is that Chandra's on the run from the law, so she's hobo'ing it up across the multiverse, fresh off her spark igniting. She thinks she's going on this grand adventure learning of her powers and the peoples of the myriad planes, but really, she's retracing the exact journey of discovery Jaya took when her spark first ignited untold eons prior.
Fun Facts: One thing I discovered in Japan that bugs me to no end is how they randomly screw up easy pronunciation stuff that could be solved in a simple email. They call Jaya "Yaya" in the Japanese translation. It's not because Japanese doesn't have that phoneme--they famously say "sanks" for "thanks," for instance since Japanese has no "th" construction, or they often say "right" for "light" since the Rs and Ls are entirely interchangeable in Japanese--rather, they call her Yaya just freaking cuz. Fix it.
Same thing with Reid Duke's name. They call him "Raid-o" since somebody apparently translated his name by looking at its spelling and plugging in the corresponding Japanese phonemes on a first-come basis, and didn't bother to listen to how it's actually pronounced, and everybody from that point on just went with it. They should be using the more accurate "Reed-o," but why bother to show respect for not just a legendary player, but also a human being?
This goes both ways, though. I hate when people call Shota Yasooka, "SHOWW-tuh (rhymes with POW!-tuh) yuh-SOO-ka." Again, show some respect and extend the minimal effort to get in the ballpark of SHOH-tah yah-so-OH-kah. Or even Yuuya Watanabe--come on, what is with this ridiculous fast-forward "wahTAHNAY-BAY" they do? It's literally, just as you read it, no tricks: wah-tah-nah-beh.
Easter Eggs: As I often do when I draw fire, I bury in the flames the Fire Nation symbol from Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Fire Energy symbol from the Pokemon TCG, and of course the Red Mana symbol from Magic: The Gathering, a popular trading card game I enjoy. But there's also a heart. And the Plane kid Chandra's on is of course Kamigawa, which features those fantastic Jim Nelson swamps.
Not normal,
Reuxben
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