MTG Honored Hydra Alter - Snakes in a Drain

A very straightforward extension, it's dark there's not a lot you can change but at the same time you don't want to ruin the atmosphere. You also don't want this guy in your hand, once you have him in the graveyard though what are you going to use to represent Embalm? as luck would have it I've got you covered, check back Friday to see how.    

MTG Drake Haven Alter: Drake Air force

When they wont let you Astral slide in standard This is probably the next best thing so naturally i wanted to have a go at altering it. weirdly the yellows on this one were much easier to match, the pyramids turned out really well. the blue was a little harder but the really difficult part was painting the two new drakes, the one on the left even ended up being turned around as the composition wasnt working. ok now they might fly into each other but it's become one of my favorite alterations. its subtle but at the same time interesting.

And who doesn't want an army of 2/2 Drakes?

MTG Wandering Servant Alter - Day at the beach

A trip to the seaside is just what the doctor ordered. Sun-cream is rather unnecessary however. the beach umbrella is a nod to Resident evil. This wasn't the direction I was going for at first but colour matching sand is a pain so the less of it there is the better. I wonder if he will ever find his way home.

MTG Manglehorn Alter : I'm on a boat

Lets be honest, you wouldn't try to stop her. Although I;m still unsure if I should have given her an Electric Guitar.

MTG Tempt with Discovery Shenron Alter

Something a bit simpler this time around since this is just an art extension. Its worth taking a moment to think about whee we would be standing is this was out view. We would either have to be in a taller tree than the ones in front of us or on the edge of a mountain. Either way that leave the area at the bottom of the image rather dark with just a hint of foliage. It also means we will be looking almost straight on at the clouds and that means we should be able to see the tops of them. I say that but initially I had them extending off the top of the card I knew something was wrong though and luckily realised what it was.

I didn’t want to leave things at that though. So I summoned a dragon. It could be Shenron, perhaps if your more MTG inclined it's Jugen or one of the other Kamigawa dragons. whatever the case it was very tiny details. 

Roadhog Craterhoof behemoth MTG Alter

Trying something a bit different with this one. Once I had a layer of grey primer done in acrylics I decided to paint the actual image using Ink's. It ends up being one of those pieces that work in person but when you present a scanned close up you get to see all the tiny bush strokes and any flaws.

Anyway I really like the way the Ink lets me colour the text boxes, being thinner than typical paint means I don’t have to worry about going around the text as unless I go really dark it will show through.

The downside of the medium is that once you build up a few layers the Ink decides it doesn’t want to mix anymore and will start to clump. If you ant to do any blending do it right on the first few passes is what I'm saying. 

Narset Enlightened Master Alter

Much of the art that ends up on cards is cropped in some way. It might be to zoom the image in or adjust the focus of the image, or perhaps they just didn't like that tree.

Whatever the reason art that's been cropped makes extending a peice of art much easier, lost a tree? Paint it back in.

Narset isn't one of those pieces of art. The image fits the art box exactly and theres very little scenery around the edges to work with. 

So instead of trying to force a background I've decided to add a magic spell effect. Theres a very nice spirally quality to this image and I wanted to emphasis it.

The spell has flecks of metallic in it too so when you move the card about it catches the light.

MTG Alter: Seige Rhino to LOTR Elephant

Here's a Siege Rhino who's got a bit lost and wandered into the LOTR universe.

She's also wearing an elephant disguise, like you do.

Yellows and Purples are notoriously difficult to match so I'm very pleased about how this one came out. I've been uing a wet pallet lately and thats helped a grest deal in colour mixing, it also gives greater control over paint thickness and preserve colous between sessions.

With hindsight I should have changed the logo into the eye of Sauron, at the time, focused on the art I didn't even see the text box.

Frodo and Sam are going to have a long walk with this new desert in the way.

Custom Wurmcoil Tokens Haiku

 

Light and Dark in balance.
As coiling snakes like Life(link) and Death(touch).
Wurmcoil tokens painted as one.

Morpheus Ponder MTG Alter

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.

Custom MTG Dr Doom and Doombots Zombie Tokens

Things have been rather hectic of late so I thought it would be a good idea to ease back into blogging with a short post about a set of tokens that I have recently created.

I didn't need to, create them that is, not in the sense that their existence was required at least. On another level however it was vitally important that i got the idea out of my head and sometimes the most expedient way of doing so is just to get on and put pen to paper.

Mostly stylus to graphics tablet in this case, then printer to paper, but you get the idea. Like a song that gets stuck in your brain on loop I couldn't stop thinking about how amusing super deformed Dr Doom tokens would be.

Once you have decided to create Doom tokens however the real issue becomes what creature type should they be? The smart money is on looking at the meta and choosing the most used type but there was just something that felt off about doing them as soldiers or warriors, Dr Doom is no measly 1/1. In the end I went with my first choice and zombies it was.

You cant have Doom doing all the heavy lifting though, no he's got a country to run and superheros constantly messing with his schedule. 

He's a busy man so whats needed are some lackeys and if there's one thing zombies do well its numbers. not so much counting mind, more the physical quantity, although in this instance the fact that they are Doombots should mean they have some basic grasp of maths.

I went with your standard old school basic comic Doombot for the rank and file members of the squad because they would be a similar height to Doom himself and would fit the space better. Then brought in the bots from the Fantastic Four: Worlds Greatest Hero's cartoon to act as the heavies and fill out the background. whichever version you go for the important part of making them super deformed is to make the bodies significantly smaller than the head which usually ends up being at least a thrid of the size of the character.

Finish your squad off by splitting them across a series of cards for that added teamwork factor when you play them to the battlefield, add some fancy glows and a bit of depth of field to get more benefit out of the fact your putting them on foil, then all you have to do is set up a sheet of them and hit print.

Well then you have all the fun of craft tools and glue but the drawing part is over at least.

If there's anything that's defined this year so far, aside from the obvious lack of posts, is that things have progressed somewhat, mostly in therms of my own skills,

Its partly why I wanted to start with these tokens, there's just something about the fact that I can now do rounded corners that makes it seem like things are starting to come together, especially when you combine them with the fact I have started adding my own backs.

I wasn't happy with the way the tokens I had been making were a bit on the thick side. While creating a custom back makes the production process more complex, lining everything up and bonding the various layers together can be tricky, but combined with the rounded corners gives a sense of completeness that some of my tokens had been lacking up until this point.

So in a way maybe they did need to exist, it was just one of those moments where everything comes together to make something cool.

Rescue Rabbit Evee Alters

It has been quite hectic of late and I haven't had time to really sit down and write as much as I would like. Which is a bit of a shame as what I want to write will hopefully be quite substantial, in the mean time while I figure out those posts here are a pair of Rescue rabbits dressed as Evee from pokemon.

I think the most surprising thing was that Rabbits pose is so close to Evee's default, the only slight issue being the shape of the ears.

I was tempted to go crazy with background glazes but in the end decided to just add metallic highlights to some of the high points on the characters themselves to help tie them in with the background.

Seachrome Coast - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Finally we come to the last card in this altered deck and also one of the last in line to be done, not only that but it involves colour matching both yellow and purple fun times.

As it turned out the purples weren't as odd this time as they have been known to be and with a bit of overlaying the existing art they blend quite well, it did take me some time to settle on the proper placement of the hexagons though; with a mix of scales, perspective, and curved terrain it was definitely an interesting job.

The only thing that bugs be about the finished piece is that an optical effect involving the clouds and the reflection of the moon can sometimes make the right edge not look quite right, like the border linking the top text box to the bottom one is still there even though it isn't.

That said its still one of my favourites and I am glad I left it until last who knows what it would have looked like if I had done it when I stared the project, a fitting end point for a project that involved 38 cards, 2 weeks, and a gradually increasing suspicion that the person who asked to have it done may have set me up - its a lot more work extending an entire deck that you initially think :)

Still thats not going to stop me form doing it again if anyone askes, its a whole diffrent ball game working with a theme on an entire deck as a posed to altering individual cards, and I woulndt want to miss the challenge or adventure along the way.

Trinket Mage - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

These guys are always a lot of fun to paint, you can be quite lose and imply detail with lines and simple shabes of colour not to mention all the fun you can have with the backgrounds. In the case of the four I did for this deck all the towers in the back of the image are different while following the style of quicksilver sea buildings.

Its also another one of those pieces you don't notice the full extent of the detail till you start working on the card the Nurok guy is the main focus but then theres the artefact he's taking apart and its subtle glow that lights the image slightly and the various pieces of equipment he's using.

As you can probably guess I much prefer this guy to the new art which is fine but theres just something about the original thats more interesting.

Etched Champion - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Theres not a lot to say about this card, the background is all clouds which is fine I like drawing clouds but when all your tasked to do is extend art it means that the piece ends up quite sparse.

Not sure what I would do with free reign to to anything, possibly something to do with the suns as thats the etched guys whole gig maybe something stylised.

Glint Hawk - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

One of the First cards in the deck I altered and also probably one of my favourites and the simplest to do, all the colours stick quite close together and were easy to mix and there isnt a great deal you can add without distracting from the simplicity of the image.

The elements that do break the borders do work quite well though and something extra and different (at least where unaltered creatures are concerned) for the eye to focus on.

The biggest issue with altering white cards is staying outside the borders of the text boxes since the black outlines come and go as they please (the frames use them as shadows so they are more dominant on the top right). a toothpick can help clean up any small errors but will quickly lose it point and can damage the card if you scratch to hard.

Mox Opal - Tempered Steel Deck

I would really have liked to have more time working with the opals, as it was with the task of simply extending the deck there wasn't really a great deal I could add to this card as I didn't want to add more leaves making the image potentially lopsided of pulling focus away from the gem itself.

Given more time i would have designed some sort of new background for the art the arms and gem could stay but I never really got the reason for the leaves, its not like its a lotus.

Signal Pest - Tempered Steel Deck

This was probably one of the most interesting alters from the tempered steel simply because it involved adding new things to the image rather than simply extending existing content.

Getting the yellows right can be slightly tricky as its just behind white for colours with the lowest pigment content and theres always the temptation to lay it on to thick but i think I got there in the end.

Glacial Fortress - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Time for another card from the Tempered Steel Deck and this time its one of the two nonbasic land.

One thing you have to be very aware of when altering other people's art are the dimensions the original piece was created in, additionally there is usually some cropping when the art is added to the card frame which can throw things off slightly too. this is important because if your not careful you can lose the focus of the work. For example there are many very accomplished lightning bolt extensions of the most recent art, the problem is while they add some very nice looking mountains suddenly the image just looks like a basic land with some fancy lightening.

The same thing applies here I could have extended the rocky icy downwards but this image is all about the sheer scale of the monument, your meant to be starting up at this imposing barrier towering above you. That said looking back at it now I would probably add subtle hints of rocky structures a bit further down, dark but another to blend it in a bit more.

Dispatch - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

The Dispatches were an interesting set of alters, between the orange and purple colour scheme and the chance to extend the art over other elements of the card frame. I'm still not entirely sure how many limbs this bug person ie meant to have though,