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From time to time, a painting goes unused in a project. There are any number of reasons, and I don’t worry too much. In a game like Magic, it can easily be because a card needs to get swapped out for rules reasons that might have nothing to do with the art. Given how some names change wildly, enough so that the context of the illustration no longer even applies, I’ve stopped wondering. It hasn’t happened often, but Secret Stache (my title), is one such.
Assigned as Secret Stash during the Lorwyn commissions, this was actually a tricky piece for me at first. I cast about with the given description of portraying a Boggart hiding something. From the beginning I had a whimsical mood for this piece, and a couple of the concepts had the Boggart stuffing his stash into mouths: the mouth of a statue (which had a surprised expression), or other such. I began to take one thumbnail to submission as a study, which I had long-since forgot about.
After more straight-ahead interpretations as mentioned above, here I had already arrived at the pun in my title, and was designing this kind of I don’t-know-what that was a kind of treant with growths of fungi and such all over it. It had a mustache of branches and other shapes, and the Boggart is lifting one side to place or remove its stash, while it looks suspiciously over its shoulder to see if anyone was watching. Clearly I decided along the way this was not good, and abandoned it, which is a bit unusual to get this far down the road and not even finish the drawing.
Here, the stache belongs to a giant. He wears crowns as rings, decorates his bracer with shields, and wraps his beard in patterned scarves. He uses a giant boulder as a pillow, and the trees behind solidify the scale. I submitted this version, with digital grayscale added to it, as usual. It was approved and then I re-drew the Boggart. I no longer know whether that was my own idea or Art Director Jeremy Jarvis’ .
I used to write the city where I drew sketches during those years, as I was moving fairly often. You can see I was in San Jose when I started, and had just moved to Asheville when I got to this part of the project.
It was my favorite of the first Lorwyn set and I was dismayed to see it was not released. I reached out to Jeremy to ask about it and he confirmed that it had been cut. When I learned it would not be printed in the block at all, I asked if I could show the piece around, and was given permission to do so. So I took the painting and sketches to events and such in that era to tell the story.