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Lindsey Crummett on Sorcery

Ancient Dragon and Occult Ritual on the same roster — a former Weta Workshop sculptor whose retail painting got Frazetta as its alt-art.

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Portrait of Lindsey Crummett
Photo via Collector Arthouse

Lindsey Crummett is an American-born, New Zealand-based fantasy painter and former Weta Workshop sculptor. She's from Orange County, California originally — her phrasing — and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in California before moving to Wellington in 2005 to chase film-industry work. She joined Weta Workshop in 2007 and stayed for more than a decade.

Her Weta years cover most of the studio's marquee work in that window. She came in on the props side and progressed into sculpting, then digital sculpting in Z-Brush from 2011 onwards for the Weta Collectibles line. The big credits are The Hobbit trilogy and the ongoing Avatar trilogy, with the sold-out Thranduil on Elk and Azog on Warg collectibles among her named pieces. She worked alongside Alan Lee, John Howe, and Wayne Barlowe, the painters whose Tolkien work defined the films' visual language. She'd actually visited New Zealand in 2003 and served as an Orc extra on Return of the King, which she's credited with crystallising her ambition to live and work there.

She left Weta in 2018 after becoming a mother and went freelance. The route into Sorcery is incidental: she'd done some digital sculpting for Erik Olofsson on Path of Exile, and when he started commissioning artists for the card game he scrolled back through her ArtStation portfolio. She's been on the Sorcery roster across four sets since.

Style

Crummett's preferred medium is oil paint, and every Sorcery card she's done is oil on board. The technique is unfussy and atmospheric in a way that lets the painted surface do the work — colour temperature, gestural backgrounds, light pushed from one direction to model the figure.

The training shows in the anatomy: she described the Ancient Dragon process as starting with reference for iguanas, horses, bats, and birds before any paint went down, then doing a Z-Brush sculpture to find the angle, then a Photoshop value pass for lighting, then the oil on board. That hybrid process — digital sculpt as model, Photoshop as lighting study, oil as the final pass — is the through-line on her Sorcery work. Beast of Burden used the same flow; she said she wanted "the creature's expression to show on the 'burden' of the work that it's always made to undertake." Seasoned Sellsword started life as a personal piece called Fight Like a Girl built off reference photos of female Olympic athletes "with expressions of extreme concentration on their face." The work that surfaces on the cards has been thought-through at the figure level twice before the brush touches the board.

Cards on Sorcery

Collector Arthouse lists fourteen Sorcery cards under her name across the game's four major sets. The two that matter most for collectors are the elite Airborne minion that opens almost every Codex example, and the Alpha card that got the Frazetta alt-art.

Ancient Dragon, the official Codex's canonical Airborne example

Ancient Dragon by Lindsey Crummett — via Curiosa

Ancient Dragon (Alpha/Beta). The retail printing of the card the official rulebook uses when it has to show what Airborne actually does — a four-life Elite minion who can step into Airspace as one of her movement options and only be blocked by other Airborne or Ranged units. Crummett's iguana-horse-bat-bird research stack is visible in the final image: the wings read avian, the body reads reptilian, the leg articulation reads equine. She painted the dragon mid-bank rather than perched, which is what sells the keyword. The card is detailed in Every Sorcery Keyword Explained — Ancient Dragon is the entry the Codex opens the Airborne section with.

Occult Ritual (Alpha — standard retail). Crummett's retail painting depicts hooded cultists pulling a demonic face out of the smoke rising off a summoning fire. The flavor quote underneath is from H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror — she's told Collector Arthouse she didn't know the literary reference at the time but found it fitting once she did. The smoke is the trick: she described enjoying the moment of making the demonic face materialise out of it.

The Sorcery Kickstarter hit a $2 million stretch goal partway through 2021, and the team at Erik's Curiosa announced an alt-art Occult Ritual using a painting from the Frank Frazetta estate. The card already had Crummett's retail printing — and now that artist would share a slot with the man who painted Death Dealer. Her reaction, in her own words to Collector Arthouse, was "oh god don't put mine directly next to his!!" She later added that she was "nothing but humbled" by the pairing. The full Frazetta alt-art story is in Frank Frazetta on Sorcery; Crummett's retail print is the version the average player owns.

The wider footprint. Beyond those two, the Collector Arthouse artist index credits her on twelve more across the four sets — Angel Ascendant, Beast of Burden, Cold Iron Rod, Coy Nixie, Cranky Overseer, Flagellant, Funeral Pyre, Giant Killer, Golden Dawn, Incinerate, Palliburrie Bats, Regurgitator, and Scarecrow. Seasoned Sellsword (her Fight Like a Girl piece) is in there too. An unusually wide standard-card footprint for an artist who isn't doing parallel Curio work.

Where to see more Crummett

  • ArtStation — lcrummett.artstation.com — her primary professional portfolio. The Weta collectibles work, the freelance illustration, and the Sorcery pieces all live there. ArtStation was also the portal Erik scrolled when picking her for the game in the first place.
  • Cara — cara.app/lcrummett and Instagram — @lindsey_crums_art — the social channels. Process posts, work-in-progress shots from the studio, and the occasional in-person print sale.
  • INPRNT — lindsey_crummett — open-edition print sales of Ancient Dragon, Occult Ritual, and other Sorcery pieces. The closest thing to owning the painting if a 2.5-inch card or a private four-figure alt-art aren't options.

Sources

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