steve argyle: one of the worst artists in magic's history

Most modern Magic art is pretty good. More specifically, it varies from “eh” to “that’s kinda cool,” with very little deviation therein. The strict style guides, combined with art direction that seems to be aimed at creating a generic house style for Magic, have pushed out most of the truly unique artists from the game. There are a few holdovers, namely Terese Nielsen, whose art direction often invents ways of saying “make something that looks like Terese Nielsen art.” There are some recognizable styles, like Raymond Swanland’s “ALL SPIKE EVERYTHING,” the logical conclusion of Magic art trying to be as badass and masculine as possible.

And there’s Steve Argyle, who’s fucking awful.

This isn’t the first time I’ve expressed this. Back in 2012, I wrote about my first experience seeing Chosen of Markov, a card that tells the story of a sweet innocent-but-hopefully-of-legal-age woman with shockingly shiny/glowing skin transforming into (and I will self-quote on this) a titmonster. I then moved on to his Naya Battlemage, a collection of leafy bondage pointing at a near-naked woman with bizarre proportions, before the main event: his horrific rendering of Liliana.

But this is about more than one man’s grotesque ideas of what women’s bodies are. This is about art, damn it, and I’d rather have art in my game from A Literal Nazi (if there’s some interesting shading when he paints Klansmen) than more of Argyle’s hack work.

Now, a bunch of disclaimers here. I am not a visual artist. I have not attempted to paint anything since I was 13. I know nothing of digital illustration methods. I don’t care in the slightest how someone makes their work, if their end product is good. But Argyle is an artist whose work I can look at, and at a glance, tell that it looks digital. It looks digital in a bad way. Everything is glowing, there’s DETAILS DETAILS everywhere that there don’t need to be, there’s no compositional focus because he’s playing around with filters and textures and shit.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know what the original art description was here, but it certainly turned out as a painting of a truly nasty fart.

With a lot of bad Magic art, there are easy excuses. “Oh, that’s just old Magic art,” someone would say about Amy Weber. “Well, he was art director and just had to make some stuff to fill hopes,” about Jesper Myrfors. “Nepotism at its finest,” with regard to Pete Venters. What are the excuses for Lavalanche? Please explain to me why that has sullied my gorgeous brown eyes with its hideousness.

Well, at least he’s not working in Magic any more.

Oh.