MCC TCG Sky Battle Art Part 2
Blockwise, Mobility, & Combat Skill Cards Art
So guess who drew 30 cards in 2 weeks :D thumbnailing is my passion
This was heavily in collaboration with Noxcrew Creative Director Skyao who was wonderful to work with and it was truly a team effort to figure out what would be the best composition to show what each card did. There was a ton of back and forth where comps I'd drawn for certain cards got reassigned to other ones which saved a lot of time. The card names fluctuated here and there throughout the early development too since they weren't set in stone yet so some names on my iteration passes are different to what they ended up being in the end.
You can see this is where I brought back the benday dots + triangles from the booster box covert art because it was just an easy quick way to create poppy visual interest but also keep it cohesive to the overall art direction of the game assets. Skyao had created the lil standee guys for the game board creator pieces at that point and thus the characters on these cards are based on them. I still call them my cute legally distinct spidermen though -w-b
[Speed Bridge] had to be done first for the rules video so it gets its own separate comp set!
Getting into the card comps, I realised very quickly that it was WAY too many cards to keep track of, so I made a whiteboard canvas and this was where a big bulk of the brainstorming and reorganising went on. Confirmed card compositions to the left, my comp iterations to the right for Skyao to look at/pull from/draw over.
To give an idea of how much the cards evolved/got moved around, here's a breakdown for one of them:
None of my original [Build Block] comps were used, top left got rotated by Skyao and turned into [Corner Peek]. [Set Up] comps (the name was later changed to [Trip Em' Up]) got converted into [Build Block] and [Reflective Barrier] instead.
So then, Skyao drew these to help visualise for me what she wanted [Trip Em' Up] as a card to be
And I drew these to iterate on the concepts provided
I drew the left one first and Skyao pointed out how it was weird how the characters were successful, and the point of the card was to create obstacles to inhibit the opponent, so I drew the second one and that got approved. Problem was, that card comp was now conflicting with the [Reflective Barrier] chosen comp because they looked too similar - small character on bottom left, large focal point on upper right of the piece. So I ended up making a completely new composition for that card and it became this:
To me the most important thing about this project was that every card looked different from each other and you could instantly tell at a glance what it was for.
(KYOYK stood for [Knock you off your feet] which came from [Set Up] which later became [Trip Em' Up]. There was a lot of card name changing going on X'D)
There were less revamp rounds going forward because of the recycling comps + I communicated more heavily with Skyao to figure out what the cards did + it's easier to draw movement/combat than it is object based illus XD
The final [Spot Weakness] card is a combination of the bottom right comp I made for it with the scared dude of [Sadistic Joy] (that card name later became [Life Siphon] I think?)
Truly cannot understate how helpful the drawover and comp assistance was
[Quick Craft] was a comp Skyao made and I just made it look pretty
My favourite dual composition cards are these guys
These are the cards that I pushed foreshortening and perspective the most and I'm really happy with how they came out
Just need that composition spice
But ye that's the skill cards :D
