Anna Podedworna's art brings the world of The Witcher to life

Many of the cards in Gwent—the standalone version of the game, rather than the one you'll find in The Witcher 3—are animated. Characters swing swords and cast spells, and even the static images slide around as if the camera can't be still. It makes them feel active and alive, but the art on those cards is so gorgeous sometimes you just want to stare at it without distraction. Well, now you can.

Anna Podedworna is senior concept artist at CD Projekt Red and she's illustrated over 50 Gwent cards. Among them are iconic characters from The Witcher series like Ciri and Yennefer, as well as some of the cards representing Geralt's abilities, Igni and Yrden. We liked these so much we put them on the cover of PC Gamer #297, both the regular and subscriber editions. But my favorite of her character pieces is the illustration of Dandelion for the Poet card, bemoaning the fate of the musical instrument he has just domed somebody with.

Podedworna's drawn plenty of monsters too, like the Archgriffin with the sun at its back and the Vran warrior perched on a snowy mountain (apparently an early draft of that card was immune to Biting Frost, hence the unusual placement of a humanoid lizard in such a cold location). Her werecat looks like it's about to leap down and take you apart.

She's got a solid line in regular animals with plenty of personality too, as seen in the Roach card that places Geralt's horse in its natural habitat of an inconvenient rooftop. Meanwhile, there's something about the art for Prize-Winning Cow that's a little disconcerting.

Check out those, and plenty more, in the gallery below. You can find more of her work on her ArtStation page, and keep up with our Gwent coverage here.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.