I've been noticing that my posts have been getting quite long lately and perhaps its time to start mixing in some shorter ones. I've also got a number of alters and tokens I need to talk about so lets merge two birds into one stone and start a series of short articles about small cardboard art, lets say no more than 500 words and to be generally released at the end of the week since mats tend to be at the beginning. What started this chain of thought was doing my first magic alter in a while, the scene in the Matrix Morpheus offers Neo a choice, see what they did there?
As it turns out practicing in one medium helps in others, the whole image is an exercise of building shapes from light and shadow something you may have noticed me talking about more in recent posts.
There was much use of a magnifying glass. One of the hardest parts was choosing how much detail was too much, its only a small area the extra resolution you get with the glass skews how its going to be mostly seen from a distance, to much detail and it starts to get difficult to 'read'.
Morpheus’s head is a good example: At one point his brow had wrinkles in it, made sense through the glass but they just didn't look right from a distance.
The real tricky part was the chair, the light and shadow areas have to be right to give the appearance of lumps and on top of that the highlights have to be super sharp to give that glossy leather look.
Figured out a new way of getting the design on to the card though, definitely improves the detail.
Its surprising how long something like this can take considering the size, its handy to have something else to do while a layer of paint is drying so you not tempted to add more
Fun though, I'd like to see what I could do with a full art alter at some point
Until next time Keep it. relatively. short and sweet.
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