I was a big fan of the Terry Pratchett's discworld books when i was younger and they heavily influenced how I thought about fantasy, he has a great imagination for the 'what if' (what if light was one of the slowest things in the universe...) and a love of making the intangible, tangible. Reading his books he explained magic had some form of colour, and maybe it had some sort of substance, that you could hold it (carefully I would imagine , and probably with some sort of special gloves ). That notion stuck with me.
Magic the Gathering extends very neatly into this world view, especially for me as an artist. I'm having to visualy represent magic quite a lot within it, and the magic is broken up into different colours, that usualy have to be reflected in the feel of the art. This worked especially well in the post apocalyptic block of magic, Time Spiral . In this return to the now ravished, disintegrating, depiction of Dominaria, magic (or mana) was to be depicted as quite rare and precious. This was natural for me to express by simply removing most of the colour from my work and concentrating it in any magical effect (if any) that might be going on within the piece.
So when I was invited to work on the Shadowmoor I noticed that this was a kind of fairy world, a world, in my mind at least, constructed entirely of magic. So I was able to take all this colour I'd been saving up from Time Spiral set, and let it rip into most of the pieces i did for Shadowmoor. The results were, well, colourful. Here's a direct comparison of a Time Spiral piece “Voidmage Husher” and below that a Shadowmoor one “Advice from the Fae".
