The Art and Design of Nicholas Fair

07/15/2024

The new trophy is here! Here are some of the concepts from the design process, as well as the final approved concept and a split with the final trophy and my concept, showing just how close the drawings I do are to the final product produced by the amazing team over at Volpin Props

09/23/2023

The Legendary Sword of Fire & Ice: a staple of Magic the Gathering for over a decade, and I was asked to re-imagine it so it could be brought to life. It's finally here, as the Grand Champion Award for the Cosplay Contest as part of MagicCon Vegas 2023

I'm still in shock at the incredible work done here by the team over at Volpin Props. The char effects on the blade are especially breathtaking; and the fine details around the handle and hilt? *chef's kiss*

More beautiful than I could have imagined, and it's literally from my brain. Magic: The Gathering

Concept art coming soon.

07/03/2023

A while back, a good friend of mine asked me to help him flesh out a new RPG character he was planning on playing in a homebrew RPG. Although the inception for the character was essentially "can I be a robot that eats people?", it quickly evolved into a fantastic take on the wandering ronin archetype mixed with the classic "abandoned, unique robot is revived in a new world" trope and I was more than excited to be a part of it.

So here we are! This is my series of illustrations of "Ken", an advanced automata refugee and the last remnant from a once-war-torn world he was created to protect. My friend knew *way more* than I did about bushido, samurai, & swordsmanship, and had crafted a fantastic backstory for the character, so our back-and-forth creative process was a total blast AND learning opportunity. Win-win. I can't wait to hear about all the hijinks he gets up to in the future.

07/08/2022

Meet the ALGS Championship Trophy, in all of her fabulous glory!
This trophy is the latest for the Apex Legends Global Series: 2022 Championship, and one of the most complex designs I've ever had to do (let alone everything the amazing team at Volpin Props had to do to actually, you know, make it a reality!)

Check out the final trophy, as well as some of my ideation sketches and the final designs I sent over. For some context, the final trophy is 24" tall and was based off the following design criteria:
1.) Angular and geometric (related to other ALGS trophies)
2.) Showcases the Apex Legends "A" logo
3.) Is a nontraditional, unconventional "cup" trophy (non-circular, no handles, etc.)
4.) Leans hard into chrome, gold, and flat red.

Digital Artist Jill Cope (https://www.artstation.com/jillcope) is the brilliant mind who rendered the insane geometric mobius strip of a trophy into a real thing.

04/27/2022

03/03/2022

More previews of the pests I designed for Magic: the Gathering's Strixhaven with Volpin props. God, they're so damn cute.

02/11/2022

Fun fact: a little while back I got the chance to design some new pests from for the team over at Volpin Props and the raw sculpts/casts are finally being revealed! I've been waiting on this for a while and am PSYCHED!!! This little guy was the first one off the docket, inspired by the world guide of Strixhaven and, naturally, spiny caterpillars.

Initial concepts for the pests came from the awesome mind of
Work for
Amazing sculpt work by

12/21/2021

A glimpse at some of my illustration work from the last year.

12/11/2021

IT'S TIME!!!

For those who don't know, I got my start in trophy designing with the Magic the Gathering Invitational Trophy back in 2016. So it seems only fitting that I got to revisit that design when Wizards came back asking for a trophy that was bigger, badder, and more gold-plated.

World Champion Yuta Takahashi had this show up in his mail today: it's about 44 pounds of resin and metal, and was crafted by the wonderful artisans over at Volpin Props!

This rendering is the final design the team settled on after nearly 11 months of iteration, and I love how it turned out. I'll be posting more of the process soon, so stay tuned!

11/23/2021

Making anything, especially an e-sports trophy, has a lot of steps. I got the chance to design the
Horizon Cup for the team at
by pitching & refining concepts for turning the Wild Rift swipe into a 3D cup. Check out the process from start to finish!