Leyak, The Rangda’s Daughter
A Balinese folk creature that sucks the blood of pregnant women and newborns. A Magic the Gathering card design.
Progress
This piece was for a Magic the Gathering card for my Digital Illustration Class. I have everything put into a Google Slide for easily compiling, so forgive the image quality.
First, I started out with research.
I wanted to focus on two cards: black and green cards.
For the black cards, I wanted to do either a mythological creature, specifically the Leyak. I was also inspired by decay, disease, and malnutrition. I took from diseases like mad cow disease, and fictional diseases from an Instagram series I was into at the time, the ‘Everfree Infection”. I also loved the idea of doing something based off of the Doll Heads Trail in Georgia as well.
For the green card, I was heavily inspired by plants and I liked the idea of weird creature design and sentient, moving, horrific plants.
My favorites ended up being unsurprisingly- two black cards. One based on the Indonesian folk creature- the Leyak, and one based on the Babydoll Head trail in Georgia. I did sketches for both of them, and the professor and I mutually agreed that the Leyak was much more engaging and less technically challenging.
For context: The Leyak is a creature with a head and entrails down the neck. They feed off of newborns and the blood of pregnant women.
Next, the color comps:
The one I took straight from a James Jean piece were chosen. It conveyed sickliness well and didn't look like some weird Halloween movie.