MTG Honored Hydra Embalm Token Sock Hydra

Sometimes people ask you how you come up with your ideas. obviously if your doing something based on guidelines that's easy but what about the rest? Well I can't say i have the answers to that, sometimes neurons fire combining various streams of thought and you end up with hydras made out of socks. It seemed to make sense at the time. The light is really what makes this piece for me, there's an almost realism that's just not quite there but is enough to cause you to stop. I think blurring the background helped too. The other ting that this did was inspire a series following the same theme but those can be for another time. 

And at least we finally know what happens to all your lost socks.

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.

Ugin and the Dragonlords Custom Playmat

Welcome back to another episode of attempting to fit large, flying, mythical creatures into a 12 by 24 inch space. Yes today we will be talking dragons (not literally becoming talking dragons – talking about them) as I look at the Ugin and the Dragonlords playmat.

Brief:

Get Ugin and the five Dragons of Tarkir Dragonlords onto a mat (thats clearly a band name which explains why the colour scheme ends up very similar to the Blue Eyes Ultimatemat), the planeswalkers Sorin, Elspeth, and Sarkhan should be riding Ugin.

Initial Thoughts:

Right off the bat there is an issue of scale. If we make the walkers the central focus then theres not much room left for the dragons, conversely with the dragons as the focus the walkers will be end up being quite small. Best to keep this in mind while working on the sketches.

Secondly if the walkers are riding Ugin what does that mean? Do we draw him in a typical dragon flight pose with them on his back? How will that affect his look since he's got more of a humanoid body layout?

Thirdly how the heck am I going to get all these wings on here and not end up obscuring more relevant details?

Sketching:

A great deal of time was spent drawing thumbnail sketches, trying out various layouts then narrowing down the list of options. Quite early on I discard the idea of having all the dragons flying along on some sort of sky background since then everyone ends up tiny to get everything in. Next out goes the idea if the walkers on Ugin's back, I don’t like focus and there are some odd angles. For some reason I get inspiration from those WW2 American recruitment posters Ugin Needs You! So now the walkers are going to have to sit on his shoulders. He only has two and we are trying to avoid the image being too symmetrical so one is slightly further away from us that doesnt leave much space for three large people. Well he's got a hand free theres an empty space in the lower right of the image that could work.

I'm finally getting a better sense of how I want these dragons personality’s to come across. Red / Black wants to be zooming along so lets try and get some sense of speed maybe a swooping motion. We have enough space available to have at least one pair of wings in full view, what do you mean she has two pairs?

Theres no way Blue / Black is going to be exerting much energy if he doesn’t have to, anywhere on the ground is fine.

They are dragons so there should probably be some breath attacks somewhere. Red / Green seems the best choice, fire and all that, also we want bulk and a sense of strength. Theres a large space in the bottom right free which means...

We need to balance out the image so the other bulky dragon has to go in the opposite top corner. Have a breath attack to mirror the other? Perhaps though Red / Blacks wings fill that role. Going to have to work the White / Green dragons pose around Ugin's pointing finger though, perhaps landing? Reminder to look up falconry.

Which leaves Blue / White. Keep it flowing. Inquisitive, what do Planeswalkers taste like?

Final layout.

I'm going for something slightly different this time since the wings and breath attack form a useful box that draws your eye around the image BLACK. I mean there are still going to be spirals in it, duh, but they aren't whats holding the layout together the RED lines show a number of them but there are vortices all over the image.

Ugin needs enough image space to have room for not only his own great bulk but for walkers to hang on. I decide to draw him being released from his cocoon since it means I wont have to draw his legs. One of the weird things about Ugin, and Bolas is that they have been depicted in art at a variety of scales from slightly larger than human to towering monstrosities. If I'm going to fit the Planeswalker's on him then Ugin's going to have to be closer to the later and if thats the case we can making him look bigger by placing our viewer lower in the image, as if we are looking up at him, BLUE. Since Ugin is also the main focus of the image we are going to have him as central as possible.

Hey look the GREEN lines show us everyone more or less fits within the rule of thirds its almost like I planed it that way. We are also trying to keep the dragons away from the page edges, its not entirely been possible since there are arms and wings going everywhere but for the most part their bodies don’t touch the edges.

Walking Through The Air.

I scan the mats into the computer to do most of these blog posts. As you can imagine an A4 scanner isn’t as large as a mat so it involves combining six separate scans into a cohesive whole. It also has the side effect of showing up the mats underlying fabric structure which while interesting in its own right does slightly distract from other details. The trade off of course is that if I just photographed the mats I may not get all the details in the first place. I think in the end it comes down to what your trying to show and for me and this post it apparently means beards and fly away hair.

In the above image we zoom right in to look at the details on the walkers, keep in mind these are really tiny details, in the face boxouts we are looking at areas somewhere in the region of 1cm square so theres not a lot of room. The main goal then is not to try and add as much detail as possible but to draw something that implies what you want it to when viewed at from a more natural distance.

Lets take Sorin's head as an example. It's a blue square with a dark line that may imply cheekbones, a 'L' shape that may be where the edge of the nose is, two dark ovals and a slightly lighter splodge where the eyes are expected, and a thin line that could be construed as a mouth. Its not really a head its a series of marks but because of the way our brains lie to us thats what we interpret it as. As an aside its always amusing to see who Facebook thinks characters you have drawn are, its sort of nice as an artist to know a computer at least thinks these marks on the page are vaguely human shaped.

The box next to that is interesting also since it shows how the fabric doesn’t always scan the same in each section. Putting the whole image together tends to be easier if you scan each section the same way up.

Whilst these areas are very small you can still use light and dark to try and recreate certain effects. If we draw little '>''s in a darker colour on Elspeth's armour it gives the impression of scale mail. On the other hand the little black bump on the side of Sarkhan's hand is probably just a tiny bit more detail than we actually need, its meant to be his thumb but we could probably expressed 'hand'-ness without it. Its all about striking a balance, make sure to move between working close up and looking at you image from a distance.

Finally since they are riding a large once godlike dragon lets mess their hair up a bit to give more of a sense of movement. Elspeth may or may not also be slightly concerned about her armour melting. As she should, we are dealing with 'Ugin and the Dragonlords' they know how to turn it up to 11.

Until next time... I want to make a rock the dragon pun but the Dragonball mat was a few posts ago.

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.

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.

infernity Infect Game-Mat

When one person asks if you can do an image for someone else, say for a birthday, it then becomes an amusing game to try and find out what that person would like without tipping them off, as you can see from this mat what that person was into at that time was infect cards from MTG and infernity from Yugioh.

The first job on this mat was posing Glissa as I wasn't really a fan of one of her arts and didn't feel the sitting pose was all that interesting from the other. That done it was time compose the full image and once again I have gone with the trusty spirals, I'm even noticing an even larger vortex now that I look back at it that I didn't see before. The scales of each character really dictated their placement, Blightsteel is huge so unless he wanted to only partially be in the image he was going to have to stand at the back.

The blending on Glissa's armour is also one of the first times I was tempted to be a bit loser with the colours than the typical cel shaded look, I have come quite a long way from there to the mat I have just finished with doesn't use fine-liners, not that theres anything wrong with them but it was something I had been meaning to try for some time, but more on that another time.

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.

Vampire Game-Mat

I think my favourite requests are the ones I would have never thought about, things that go beyond the obvious. Sometimes you go wow why didn't I think of that and others you go, right hows that going to work. When someone gives you a list of the top 20 to 30 cards from their MTG Commander Vampire deck and asks you to put as many as possible on a mat it turns out to be a bit of both.

In the end I decided the best corse of action was just to represent the creatures and physical objects as spells tend to be a bit random in their tone and are more difficult to get the meaning across. From there it was just a matter of trying to squeeze everyone in while maintaining some from of layout, in this case a large triangle that draws yours focus across and down the design then back up again. I could probably have filled the whole mat with images but sometimes less is more and I really wanted to get some form of skyline in partly to tie the three characters with towers in their are into the rest of the image, partly to get bad moon and the black mana symbol in, but mostly because I didn't want the whole thing to be flesh tones and purple.

Working slightly more loosely with the colours on this one with quite a bit of blending going on the peice only really came together for me once I started working on the little details. this mainly involved the artefacts, finding good places to hide them to be discovered later of choosing suitable characters to hold them. My favourite elements are probably the massive impact that vast area of bright yellow has and the tower the nocturnus is standing in. 

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,