Andrea Modesti is an Italian illustrator from Pavia, a medieval university town just south of Milan, and he came to Sorcery from the historical-illustration world rather than the trading-card one. He studied traditional painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, trained additionally as a trompe l'oeil decorator, and built a career illustrating books and magazines across historical subjects, naturalistic themes, and landscapes. Sorcery: Contested Realm is, by his own account, his first TCG.
That background is the whole story of his cards. He grew up under the Visconti Castle, and the deep pull toward the Middle Ages, its folklore, its myths and its military, runs through everything he paints. His stated influences are the historical-illustration canon and the German Romantics: Angus McBride, John Howe, Alan Lee, and Caspar David Friedrich. On the Sorcery roster he is the period-accurate medievalist, the painter you hand the foot soldiers, the longbowmen, and the village sites.
Style
Modesti works in watercolor and gouache, and he is specific about the method: backgrounds laid in with very diluted wet-on-wet watercolour glazes, then details brought out with gouache where the image needs more thickness and opacity, all on fine-grain 100% cotton paper. It is a traditional, hand-painted technique, not a digital one, which fits Sorcery's all-painted house style cleanly.
Across the table his cards read as the most historically grounded on the board. Where other artists reach for high fantasy, Modesti reaches for the real fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: accurate armor, flamboyant period costume, and the discipline of historical military formations — pikemen in their hedge, longbowmen at the draw, monks and laborers and banner-bearers. His subjects, in his own framing, run to alps and mountains, lakes and forests, moors and animals, castles and ancient villages, all drawn from Middle Age folklore. The watercolour base gives his landscapes and skies an atmospheric, slightly Romantic softness; the gouache gives the figures and armor their edge.
Cards on Sorcery
Collector Arthouse lists Modesti as appearing in Alpha, Beta, and Arthurian Legends, and indexes roughly a dozen cards under his name. The credited set is the medieval infantry-and-village cluster:
- Albespine Pikemen, Belmotte Longbowmen, Candlemas Monks — Arthurian Legends rank-and-file, the period-military pieces he describes as his comfort zone.
- Foot Soldier — listed with multiple variant printings, the workhorse common.
- Field Laborers, Fine Courser — minions and mount.
- Bailey, Forge, Hamlet, Common Village, Castle's Ablaze! — the Sites and the burning-castle event, where his village-and-castle subject matter lands directly on the card type that asks for it.
He also describes the work in interviews under in-development or alternate titles — Shieldwall, Banner Knight, Bannerman, Falconer, Scent Hounds — so the exact mapping of every painting to its final printed card name is not fully pinned down from a single source. What is firmly documented is the Collector Arthouse index above and his own account of painting dozens of illustrations for Erik Olofsson over the course of about a year, with creative freedom on the assignments.
Where to see more Andrea
- andreamodesti-art.blogspot.com — his own blog, the source of record, with multiple posts documenting his Sorcery illustrations as he painted them in 2020–2021.
- His Sorcery cards — the Arthurian Legends infantry and the Alpha/Beta sites; cross-reference the printed art on curiosa.io by card name.
- Collector Arthouse — Andrea Modesti — the full Sorcery card index this piece draws on, plus a long-form artist interview.
Sources
- Andrea Modesti — Collector Arthouse artist page — "Appears In: Alpha, Beta, Arthurian Legends"; watercolour-and-gouache historical work; Italy base; the card index (Albespine Pikemen, Bailey, Belmotte Longbowmen, Candlemas Monks, Castle's Ablaze!, Common Village, Field Laborers, Fine Courser, Foot Soldier, Forge, Hamlet)
- Sorcery Artist Interview: Andrea Modesti — Collector Arthouse — Pavia/Visconti Castle upbringing; Brera Academy of Fine Arts; trompe l'oeil training; wet-on-wet watercolour glazes plus gouache on 100% cotton paper; first TCG; creative freedom from Erik Olofsson; influences Angus McBride, John Howe, Alan Lee, C.D. Friedrich
- Andrea Modesti — official sorcerytcg.com art page — official bio and credited illustrations (Bannerman, Belmotte Longbowmen, Candlemas Monks, Albespine Pikemen, Scent Hounds)
- Andrea Modesti Art — official blog — 2020–2021 posts documenting his Sorcery: Contested Realm illustrations; hand-painted; dozens of pieces over roughly a year