EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 10 © 2015 Book Palace Books (96 PAGES in Full edition)

56 a head start, using a lot of drawing and painting tools. Her early years were spent drawing constantly. She also had the advantage of learning about concepts like the colour wheel, highlights and shadows, and basic paint mixing. By the time she was 7 or 8, she was already very project-oriented, spending a lot of time making her own fairy tale book covers, board game art, or posters. And ,perhaps most important of all, she really yearned to be an artist when she grew up. Her passion for fantasy manifested itself in her teenage years. When she was fourteen, her grandfather who was a science-fiction and fantasy fan, gave her a copy of Spectrum Fantastic Art 4 . That was the definitive book that gave her a direction to go with her art. She already knew she wanted to make art for a living when she grew up, but from that point on she realized she wanted to be a fantasy artist. Cynthia then took a lot of art classes in high school, including summer programmes, and attended the fine arts at Corcoran College of Art and Design for two and a half years, though she didn’t graduate. Instead, she continued her training as an assistant for her painting professor William A. Newman in his home studio. In her early 20s, she decided to push her career in the fantasy direction, in keeping with the age-old advice: "put things in your portfolio you want to do more of ". Her online portfolio was designed as bait for fantasy game companies, in the hope that they would be able to find her work and get in touch with her. Vampires were a favourite source of inspiration when she was a teenager, mostly because of the Anne Rice novels, and it was the vampire and Gothic illustrations in her portfolio that got her the first serious jobs in fantasy art. At the start, she worked with very small independent games, some of which she was never even paid for, because the games never came to fruition. But Cynthia never saw that as a failure as she used that work to keep levelling up the quality of the artwork in her portfolio. She has ABOVE: 'Shadow-Cloak Vampire, from the on- going card series— Magic: The Gathering . Vampires were a staple part of Cynthia's teenage reading, principally the Anne Rice 'Vampire Chronicles'. ABOVE RIGHT: 'Sultry', one of a trio of portraits from 2013. Image © 2013 Wizards of the Coast Image © 2014 Wizards of the Coast