Every year, the folks at LoadingReadyRun – and a large collective of other extremely dedicated people – run Desert Bus for Hope, an annual charity stream benefiting Child’s Play and children’s hospitals across the world. A major part of the Desert Bus fundraising process is the prizes – some are raffled off as giveaways to randomly chosen donors, while others are sold in both silent and live auctions. Some of the prizes are mass-produced – there’s generally a healthy quantity of Magic: the Gathering product, for example – but a lot of them are handmade for the purpose, as part of the Desert Bus Craft-Along.
A friend of mine, who goes by iris_of_ether in most places online, is a perennial contributor to the Craft-Along, painting roleplaying miniatures and building dioramas inspired by LRR and Desert Bus. In 2021, she decided to render the whole DB crew as a multiversal group of superheroes and other characters, and when she mentioned the idea of having a file of “dossiers” for the characters, I offered to illustrate them. Little did I know what I was getting into…
After a bit more brainstorming with a couple friends who were also working on the project, we arrived at the idea of representing the dossiers as MtG tokens. Iris ended up with a list of about fifty characters she wanted to create minis for, and so I went to work…
To this day I have no idea how I produced fifty-two portraits over a few months. But here they all are. Many of the characters are taken directly from various LRR and/or Desert Bus sketches; some of them are Iris riffing off various in-jokes and references.
1 comment so far ↓
I remember these. I don’t know how you did it either. The pandemic was a different time. They still look great though!
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