Lightning in a Bottle: Nature Nurture (Emily Weatherall)

Fauna Shaman - Nature Nurture - Secret Lair Showdown

Lightning in a Bottle is short form featurette celebrating the work of an artist who, at the time of writing, has illustrated exactly one Magic card. It’s a spotlight on their achievement, and an appetizer to exploring their larger body of work.

Emily Weatherall (b.1998), known professionally as Nature Nurture, is an embroidery and fiber artist living and working in the UK. She draws upon themes from fantasy, folklore, magic, and mythology, weaving literal tapestries rich with story and bursting with narrative.

Roots (2025) Collection by Emily Weatherall

Em is a bit of an enigma online; an internet search for her or her work reveals only her socials, her store, and a handful of Beautiful Bizarre features. No flashy interviews or long-winded list-icles, you simply find the work, largely from the last five years, in all of it’s bullion-stitched glory.

Six months ago her very first Magic: The Gathering card was released, marking the first time a piece of embroidery has appeared as the artwork on a card. You might not have noticed right away at card size, but what you see above is exactly, in even grander detail, what she created for this new card.

Fauna Shaman by Nature Nurture (Emily Weatherall), Embroidery, 11” x 13”

Incredibly complex and immaculately detailed, this is Fauna Shaman as only she could create, and reimagined as never before. It’s only the third artwork (and first Secret Lair printing) for the card in it’s fifteen year history. What now appears is a mystical elf of fur and bone, summoning forth animal apparitions to their side. An eerie green light (or in this case, thread) emanates from their hand, a showcase of great power reflecting that they and their companions are not of this world.

Wolf, Eagle, Snake. Each is called to the shaman’s side in the moonlight, a shimmering, ethereal fibers filling each void and bringing the animal to life. And while the glow from this type of thread in simply out of this world, I think my favorite part of the whole work is below:

The half skeletal, half spiritual snake is so wonderfully indicative of Weatherall’s other work; it’s like her tiny signature hidden in plain sight. You can also see all the minutia in the snapshot cross-section: the individual leaves, the knotting that makes up the mortar, the stars on the shaman’s cloak. There is even a peek at the nap and texture of the surface, so earthy and rich you just want to dig your fingers down deep, in hopes of feeling the same power.

When a card can make you feel the crunch of dirt beneath your fingernails, that’s really something special.

You can follow Emily on Instagram and BlueSky, and keep an eye on her website for prints and new traditional works that appear seasonally. As of the writing of this article, the original artwork for Fauna Shaman is still in the collection of the artist; I’m sure she’d love to hear from you if you might be interested, or just want to tell her how cool it is.

Pieces like this come but once a year, and that’s if we’re lucky. It’s a medium-defining artistic highpoint of the entire year; something that has not come before, and in all likelihood, may never come again. Emily Weatherall’s Fauna Shaman is something that will live on in Magic: The Gathering history forever.