Entertainment

Her art took her from a nerdy card game to NYC gallery walls

Rebecca Leveille has made a career illustrating comics and graphic novels featuring Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” characters and others, as well as role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, under the name Rebecca Guay.

Her painterly Magic: The Gathering trading cards are so popular that when she went to Japan for an event given in her honor, she was greeted by a thousand local fans, waiting to meet her.

When she gave all that up in 2011, gaming geeks were crushed — and raised enough of a stink that Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Magic: The Gathering, released a statement promising that they hadn’t fired her.

But Leveille wasn’t axed — she was shifting her focus to romantic, 19th-century-inspired portraits. Now, six years later, those works are on display in her first show in New York City: “Crush,” at Site:Brooklyn in Gowanus.

“The illustration world is so different from the gallery world,” the 47-year-old artist tells the Post. “As an illustrator, I was at the service of a property or products. I realized I had other things I wanted to say.”

Artist Rebecca LeveilleGabriel Cosma

Leveille always wanted to draw: As a young girl in 1970s Ipswich, Mass., she spent hours poring over the illustrations in “X-Men” and “Star Wars” comics and went to museums with her artist mother to look at portraits by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Andrew Wyeth.

But when Leveille moved to Brooklyn to study art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, she found that figurative painting was no longer in vogue. So she switched her major to illustration, and upon graduation swiftly got a job at trading-card company Topps — a move that turned into a 20-year career producing illustrations for Topps, Marvel, DC Comics and more.

“I learned so much,” says Leveille. “You have to be able to do everything, draw every part of the body from every angle, and translate someone else’s vision or story.”

When Leveille left the illustrated world, she started painting traditional portraits — first, of beautiful women with flowing, Pre-Raphaelite hair and impenetrable, far-off gazes. “I think I wanted to get as far away from the illustration world as possible. I needed a clean slate,” she says.

But her paintings in “Crush” are more colorful and brash; her subjects more defiant, ranging from close family and friends to pop-culture figures such as Annie Lennox, Bond Girls and even — in a nod to her nerdy past — Princess Leia and Han Solo. They’re all set amid decorative backgrounds featuring colonial toile prints and blue-and-white china patterns.

“It took me a while, but I know that I would not be who I am had I not been an illustrator,” Leveille says. “Then I was giving a new perspective [in regards to comic book and role-playing game illustration] to many people. Now, as a gallery artist I hope to be able to give of myself to as many people.”

“Crush” runs through April 30 at Site:Brooklyn.

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