Margaret Organ-Kean

Margaret Organ-Kean
General Information
Status	Active: Antiquities to Lorwyn Eclipsed
Scryfall Statistics
29 cards 20.7% 13.8% 3.4% 6.9% 13.8% 24.1% 17.2%

Margaret Organ-Kean is a Magic artist. She illustrated over 20 cards in the earliest years of Magic, from Antiquities to Tempest. Following a nearly three-decade gap, she returned to illustrating the game for 2026's Lorwyn Eclipsed. She often attends Magic conventions, where she signs cards and creates alters.

Education and art style

Organ-Kean's artwork for Sygg's Command, shown as a preview for Lorwyn Eclipsed.

Organ-Kean attended Boston University’s School for the Arts for two years, as well as Central Washington University, before completing a degree at the University of Washington, where she majored in Art History and continued into graduate studies. Despite her frequent use of watercolor, she has not taken a watercolor class since high school.

Lotte Reiniger was a formative influence in her childhood, via fairy-tale animated shorts broadcast on Organ-Kean's local public broadcaster in the mid-1960s. Other influences include Kay Nielsen, Edmund Dulac, and Harry Clarke.

Artwork by Organ-Kean often includes geometric patterns and frames, both in the backgrounds and on subjects. Organ-Kean rejects the Renaissance-era conception of a painting as a window into space and prefers to use patterns to reinforce awareness of the flatness of the painting. The patterns draw on influences as varied as fabric arts (such as quilting), Persian and Mughal miniatures, Irish book painting, and Northwest Coast tribal art. She lists gilding, as well as metallic, iridescent, and dichroic pigments, as other tools for emphasizing the flatness of the paper, but uses them less than she would like because they reproduce poorly in printings.

When she began working on Magic, Organ-Kean used Winsor & Newton watercolors, but has since switched to Daniel Smith. Her more recent work incorporates pencil into the final product, rather than solely in the underlying sketch.

Artwork for Magic

Lion's Eye Diamond is one of Organ-Kean's most recognizable cards.

Organ-Kean first encountered Magic at the 1993 Worldcon in San Francisco, where she was impressed by the scale of Wizards of the Coast's presence at the convention, and the quality of the cards, due to the expense of color printing at the time. She viewed the possibility of getting her art on Magic cards as an economical approach to having her art printed for distribution in her portfolio. Upon returning home from the convention, she sent her existing portfolio to the art director at the time, Jesper Myrfors, and three months later was assigned three cards for Antiquities. All three of those cards were originally printed with artist attribution errors, with her surname misspelled as "Organ-Keen".

Lion's Eye Diamond initially proved the most difficult of the four cards she was assigned for Mirage. After finishing the other three, she was "trying to get something going" in an evening sketch session. She started the sketch of what became Lion's Eye Diamond around 8:00pm and found herself unable to stop working, even to submit the sketch for approval, and finished the painting in a single twelve-hour marathon.

It was an amazing experience.

The drawing just kept getting better and better and when I had the pencil down, well I'm supposed to send the sketch in for approval. But I just couldn't quit – it was like working in a dream. I just kept going until it was finished and it wasn't until then that I noticed it was 8:00 am.

I was completely addicted to that painting. I don't often have a piece hit the paper as that one did.

Kaja Foglio served as a model for Autumn Willow. Several of Organ-Kean's other artworks draw reference from persons she knew or real-world locations.

• Margaret Organ-Kean's favorite artwork
• 
  "Implements of Sacrifice is a self-portrait... Someone said that there were no fat women in fantasy art and I decided to put one in."
• 
  The Hipparion is an extinct relative of the modern horse. The card depicts the moment of summoning, from summer into winter.
• 
  Autumn Willow depicts fellow Magic artist Kaja Foglio.
• 
  Mana Prism is an intentional counterpart to Lion’s Eye Diamond.

In a 2020 interview, Organ-Kean observed that the ratio of women artists employed by Wizards had dropped since she had stopped working on the game in 1997, though it had rebounded somewhat in recent years. She expressed disapproval of the game's trend of adopting a house look for the artwork, rather than allowing more stylistic diversity, but recognized that "a number" of recent cards were "amazingly beautiful".

Other work

Useful Cards is a series of $1 USD illustrated cards, intended for assorted and open-ended uses, including as bookmarks or tokens. Organ-Kean sells Useful Cards at conventions. She developed the idea after a collector inquired about buying her last copies of Lion's Eye Diamond, and she responded that she was unsure if she had any more because she had used them for such widely varied purposes herself.

Organ-Kean has worked for Iron Crown Enterprises, and illustrated a children's book titled Petronella. She paints watercolors on commission and works as a consulting/contracting designer and technical illustrator.

Personal life

Organ-Kean no longer owns any of the original artwork from her early contributions to the game. Both she and her husband were diagnosed with cancer, and she was forced to sell her artwork to cover their medical bills. Her husband died. Margaret remains cancer-free more than five years after completing treatment.

External links

• Personal website