Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Card of the Day - Wish Away



It is frustratingly difficult to find card images. Assuming you've managed to pin down one that has the appropriate fantasy flavor (which is no small task), you still have a number of factors to consider. Is it copyrighted? If so, you'd best start your search again. Will it fit into the image box? Unlikely. Most pictures are taller than they are wide, so you'll almost certainly be cropping off pieces of your beautiful find. Sometimes this ruins the art, making it unfit for the card.
Oh, and were you thinking of making a Vedalken? A Viashino? How about even a Merfolk? Good luck. Humans, humans, humans, it's all about humans (understandably, as all the artists are human, the other races being imaginary). Still, it makes having a diverse creature-base a bit difficult. If you search on DeviantArt, you'll probably manage on elves (although some may be a bit WoWy) and you'll be fine for goblins. You will have more dragons than you'll know what to do with. Angels, Mosters, Demons, and grotesque horrors will all be easy to locate. Most everything else will be a trial. God forbid you want a tribal theme. There is extreme color-bias in DeviantArt as well. The people there are a macabre lot, on the whole, and it shows. Black art is easy to find. It practically finds itself. No trouble there. Red art is also pretty easy as long as you only want goblins and burn. What little white art I've found has all been dully similar - dudes with swords, armor, and a noble expression. Blue soaks up all the wizards you find, strange possible-counterspelly pictures, and most of the weird stuff that didn't make it into black and red. Green is a nightmare. Nobody draws insects, spiders, and bears. And to find what little fantasy art of such creatures there is, you have to slog through page upon page of pictures. Bloody pictures. And don't even try looking for green spells. As if the color-bias weren't enough, there's also a terrible creature bias. Nobody wants to draw spells. They just aren't as exciting, I guess. But that means that most sets I make are either creatures or spells (like Wish Away) with a creature's art. Wondering why that art didn't go on some Ice Gargoyle or something? Because I have too many of its kind already.

Oh, and this card is for Thursday the 5th.

Original Art

3 comments:

  1. The same set with the cat-people had another restriction: No humans because they bored me. God, even at 45 total cards that made stuff take forever. Even worse, I brought back metathran. I might as well have tried to make a Phelddagryph tribe.

    There are two pieces of metathran original art on the entire internet. One is B&W and depicts a crazy metathran cutting himself. The other is unfinished. I used them both anyway.

    Finding spell art is a nightmare all its own. I usually just go for the abstract. There was an enchantment called "Shared Memories..." I just searched for any picture that showed two heads connected in some way...

    I had a whole cycle of spirits across the colors... All the spirits on DA are basically green and I ended up using that wanky swirly fractal art you always get because it appeared in the right colors and looked creature-ish but weird enough to be some kind of spirit.

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  2. I feel your pain. Boy, do I feel it.

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  3. Yeah, same here. I ended up building a set around pictures I found interesting on Deviant art. Needless to say, it's mostly black.

    -Nameless One

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Empty your mind.