Gnome Hollows
Mattias Frisk
Today we sit down with Sorcery artist Mattias Frisk to recount the art development history of Gnome Hollows, a very powerful Atlas site card in Sorcery TCG's Alpha debut. Gnome Hollows has proved to be a highly meta relevant card in early Earth deck archetypes, shutting out units with 3 or more power from entering the site. The card is as an excellent example of how the artistic illustration pairs perfectly with the game mechanic.
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Here is the story behind the artwork in artist Mattias Frisk's own words:​
As I recall today, several years after the Gnome hollows painting was finished, the description was that it would be a hard-to-reach place, the underground cave part was the focus for the painting since the site was intended to limit the movement of powerful minions and give the ability to hide away. ​
I think also that the team had seen the painting I did for the cover art of the band “The Great Discord”. I also made a painting a few years prior to that called “the Sanctuary” on almost the same thematics. These three paintings are similar in many aspects.
The choice of colors were made out of wanting to have a bit of a dusk or dawn light above ground and warm earthy tones below, I didn't know it was an earth site back then. The sketch was a bit more green. The underpainting was made with oil and acrylics in greyscale on a mdf-board. The coloring was done by glazing thin layers of diluted oil paint over the underpainting.
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Since it was quite clear what Erik was looking for I only did one acrylic sketch before starting, not even a pen sketch. Also keep in mind that this was one of the first 4 cards I did (Flashfire aka Wildfire, Corpse Explosion aka Minor Explosion and Wrath of the sea where the others) and in total I only did 7 cards for Alpha. Gnome Hollows is a bit special for me since it is the only land I made for the Alpha set and I´ve seen it get a lot of gameplay. It is very interesting to look back at the early conversations I had with Erik. He had about 200 illustrations when I joined so he had probably established his vision but I was totally fresh painting for a tcg.
