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Francesca Baerald on Sorcery

The Italian cartographer who painted Sorcery's first finished card, both card backs, and more Avatars than anyone else on the roster.

artists baerald cartography alpha beta card-backs
Portrait of Francesca Baerald
Photo via francescabaerald.com

Francesca Baerald is an Italian illustrator and cartographer based in the Italian countryside. She graduated from the International School of Comics in Reggio Emilia and works in two parallel tracks: traditional hand-painted illustration and hand-drawn fantasy cartography.

Her published map credits run through most of the major fantasy and sci-fi publishers — Wizards of the Coast (D&D), Blizzard (the cloth map of Sanctuary that shipped with the Diablo IV Collector's Edition), Games Workshop, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Fantasy Flight Games, Square Enix, Dark Horse — plus franchise map work across Dragon Age, World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones, Gloomhaven, and Warhammer. She holds multiple ENNIE Awards and Atlas Cartography Awards, with portfolio appearances in ImagineFX and Heavy Metal Magazine.

She paints traditionally — watercolour, ink, acrylic, oil — on physical surfaces. "The feeling of shaping something with my hands, touching it and loving it even with its faults and mistakes is unique," she told Grailrunner Publishing in a 2023 interview. That commitment to physical media is the same commitment Erik Olofsson asked for when commissioning Sorcery's first cards, and the reason Baerald was an early entry in his address book.

Style

A cartographer thinks compositionally about a flat surface that has to communicate spatial relationships at a glance — where mountain ranges sit, how roads connect to settlements, what the eye should travel to first. Those are the same problems a card-frame painter solves at a smaller scale. Sorcery is a grid-based game where adjacent cards on a 5×4 board read against each other; the visual relationships matter. Baerald's Beta Avatar quartet (below) reads as a set — four characters who feel like they belong to the same world even when their Spellbooks are wildly different elements. That cohesion is partly the cartographer's compositional discipline carried into character work.

The medium reinforces the same point. Every Baerald painting is sourced from real objects, real spatial logic, real physical reference. Erik's Curiosa (below) was painted using objects she actually owns in her studio. The Beta Avatars are character studies built from costume and posture, not generated from a digital art-direction prompt. Her watercolour-and-ink tonal range slots into Sorcery's hand-painted aesthetic the way Frazetta's high-contrast oil work or Brom's gothic palette do: a recognisable signature that doesn't fight the rest of the roster.

Cards on Sorcery

The painting that named the company is hers. Erik's Curiosa was commissioned in 2019, during what Olofsson has since described as Sorcery's earliest design window — five years before the first retail set hit shelves. The brief was a medieval cluttered table: globe, maps, spell books, scattered objects from a 16th-century cabinet of curiosities. Baerald painted it at double the usual card-illustration size, using props from her own studio as reference.

Erik's Curiosa — the painting that named the company, painted by Baerald in 2019 at double the usual card-illustration size

Erik's Curiosa by Francesca Baerald — via Collector Arthouse

Olofsson — formerly Art Director at Grinding Gear Games, the studio behind Path of Exile — asked during the painting phase for an Exalted Orb (a Path of Exile currency item) to be slipped into the composition. The Curio sketch of the same painting (catalogued in Every Curio in Alpha, Documented) shows the table without the Orb. The retail Alpha printing has it tucked between the skull and the globe.

Alpha set:

  • Erik's Curiosa — the company namesake, painted at double size, with the post-sketch Exalted Orb. Both Alpha retail and the Alpha Curio sketch variant.
  • Sorcerer — the colourless Alpha Avatar with the bluntest ability in the set: tap, draw a spell, every turn. Reprinted in Beta and a perennial competitive pick. The Frank Frazetta alternate-art OP promo is a separate licensed reprint.
  • Hounds of Ondaros — one of the highest keyword-density minions in the game: Airborne, Burrowing, Submerge, and Voidwalk on a single card, plus a passive that strips Stealth from nearby enemies.
  • Pollimorph — the frog-transformation spell. Baerald painted the Curio variant catalogued in the Alpha 9-Piece Collage, which shows the historic cost symbols and the scrapped "Quick" mechanic from the pre-shipment design window.

Hounds of Ondaros — four keywords on one minion, painted by Baerald

Hounds of Ondaros by Francesca Baerald — via Curiosa

Beta booster set: The four named Avatars Beta added — the step up from the four "Avatar of [Element]" training-wheels cards — are all Baerald paintings. This is the single densest cluster of her work in the game:

  • Sparkmage (Air) — spellslinger spike Avatar
  • Geomancer (Earth) — ramp-and-sites Avatar
  • Flamecaller (Fire) — cemetery-fuel burn Avatar
  • Waveshaper (Water) — lockdown control Avatar

Geomancer — one of four Beta named Avatars painted by Baerald

Geomancer by Francesca Baerald — via Curiosa

Add the Alpha Sorcerer (reprinted in Beta), and the count is five named Avatars with Baerald's brushwork — more than any other artist on the roster. The Beta variant of Erik's Curiosa is also hers, catalogued in Every Curio in Beta, Documented as a re-issue of the original commission rather than a re-paint.

Card backs: The Spellbook back and the Atlas back are both commissioned Baerald paintings. Other TCGs treat card backs as production graphics — vector designs, procedurally-generated patterns. Sorcery's backs are paintings: warm parchment tones, ornamental borders, painted texture under the central icon, all off Baerald's brush before the press house. Every game of Sorcery starts inside her visual language.

Where to see more Baerald

  • francescabaerald.com — her personal portfolio. Cartography on /worldmaps and /bookmaps, character and illustration galleries elsewhere on the site. Commission inquiries via the "Hire Me" page.
  • Pathfinder, D&D, Diablo IV, Dragon Age, Game of Thrones, Gloomhaven, Warhammer — partial map credits across the major fantasy and sci-fi publishers. The Diablo IV Collector's Edition cloth map of Sanctuary is one of her most-distributed pieces.
  • Sorcery: Contested Realm Wiki — Francesca Baerald — community-maintained list of her Sorcery credits, useful as a cross-reference against Collector Arthouse and Curiosa.
  • Collector Arthouse — the canonical community archive for Sorcery card photography and original-art history; her Sorcery commissions are catalogued alongside the rest of the artist roster.

Sources

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