Swade Art

Finished my piece for the amazing Fire Emblem Tarot project.  If you want to see some of the other amazing art coming in check them out on twitter: @fecompendium, https://twitter.com/fecompendium

#pokemon gym #inktober day four, the Rainbow Badge! Gonna have to come back and try bamboo again because my paper and ink did not behave like it did in the tutorials I watched.

#Pokemon gym #inktober day 3, the Thunder Badge! (#pikachu #raichu #voltorb) Also fat pikachu is best pikachu. Ken Sugimori nailed it in one.

Not sure if the red for the gems was a good choice because my red ink is a different shade than my stamp. Maybe I’ll get some more colors as the month goes on?

Inktober Day 1: Boulder Badge I thought of this idea month ago but I'm gonna go through all the Pokemon gym leaders and do paintings of their teams. I'll just start from beginning!

The Dota 2 cards are now back up available for sale! The downside is that the Secret Shop has different retailers now depending on what part of the world you’re in.  So if you’re in the US/CAN/MEX it’s still WeLoveFine.  If you’re in China then it’s Perfect World:  It doesn’t look like the shops for Europe (Game Legends) or SEA (E-Club Store) are carrying them so if you want to buy cards in those reasons I implore you to email them. They definitely can stock them they just don’t know if they should unless you tell them.

Well the tough answer is, "I don't know". When the secret shop opened at TI7 in Seattle I really thought they'd be available for sale.But it turns out a limited number of items were taken to Seattle with the intent to have everything else online. And unfortunately the online shop was taken down over shipping costs.That puts me in a tight spot because no, there's not currently a way to order them. And I honestly don't even know if there will be.Which is a really tough spot to be in for a project that represents years (not exaggerating) of cumulative work. But keep an eye out, follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr because as soon as they are back up you can bet I'll be telling everyone.

This is actually one of the oldest designs in the deck, because it was actually done for TI6 as a shirt design. I was still deep at work on the deck last year and because I couldn’t hit the shipping deadlines months before TI6 I wanted to get something out to hopefully build interest.  Sort of a follow-up to the Visage of Spades shirt from 2 years earlier. I really like being able to include other character references when possible, whether that’s a weapon, an attack, or an item. In this case I thought adding in an Orchid would be rad though as always trying to interpret a shop icon into something graphic and readable is a challenge. FYI you can actually still buy the shirt though quantities are very limited.

One of the tough things in this project was coming up with a visual style that could handle all the different materials.  How to render each character’s “hair” for example took time because I needed a solution that looked good with white hair (black lines) black hair (white lines) but also yellow hair, purple hair, and things like feathers. WraithKing is actually the only character with white hair (in the beard) anywhere in the deck.

King of Diamonds - Anti Mage AM's weapons are such a weird shape it was tough to find a way to incorporate them. Also he has so many cosmetics it's odd to even see an AM with the stock weapons.

Queen of Diamonds - Templar Assassin I tried to get TA’s neck guard and shoulder pad into the design without it looking odd. This was another case where I drew the hands small, like how they’d normally be on the bicycle card but it just looked very odd so I had to scale them up significantly. Now they’re still smaller than a normal human hand (relative to the head) of course but it’s less obtrusive. More difficult was finding a way to draw the psi-blades using the limited number of colors and the graphic outline style. I tried making them larger shapes (just a simple pointed blade) and even experimented with making them a diamond to play with the suit motif but it didn’t work as well.  Though if you notice the two arcs on the sides are actually filled with little iconographic versions of the psi-blades.

The biggest challenge by far with Witch Doctor was dealing with his skin palette. Unlike a lot of the other characters where using the card texture for the skin is fine (even for a green character like Tidehunter) Witch Doctor’s very prominent skull face-paint makes that not an option. Luckily because of the same face paint there is still a lot of white on the face which keeps him from looking odd in the set but the contrast and areas of interest in the card are definitely a bit odd compared to the others. Another fun note is that we had to do a bit of censoring on this card primarily for fans in China, the stones on the end of his staff and several elements in the body had been skulls but Valve advised to change those to avoid any issues internationally. Check in tomorrow for the Queen of Diamonds

Finally for this set is the King of Clubs, WraithKing. This was one of the more ‘obvious’ characters to include given the King in the name. I started him out in as the King of Hearts though because I felt like that matched thematically and I wanted to do a Skeleton King/Wraith King top-to-bottom flip. The first thing that happened was that Valve said that Skeleton King was a no-go (so heads up for other workshop artists considering something similar). The next thing was that Monkey King was announced and worked far better in the ‘red’ color scheme than WK did.  Unfortunately this did boot out Sand King from the King of Clubs spot which is why he didn’t make it into the deck. So this card wound up killing both Sand King and Skeleton King from appearing in the deck. T_T  RIP Skeleton King: He died the way he died; dead Tune in tomorrow for the Diamonds!

Next up is the Queen of Clubs, Windranger. A funny thing about traditional playing cards is that their hands are really small. We’re so used to the designs that we don’t notice but when you apply that to new art it becomes really obvious. I don’t like to be a slave to reference but in this case the issue was that larger hands need bigger weapons.  And a bigger bow would get cut off somewhere. The hair was something I tried multiple ways, obviously Windranger should have red or reddish orange hair.  I tried both red (the color of the hearts) and new tones. The problem with both was it was the only card with that many colors. So either it would stick out or I’d need to use accent colors for all the other cards. The trouble is that the accent for each card would be different.  Tidehunter doesn’t need red/orange for an accent, if anything he’d need a blue. I tested this idea on a set of finished designs and the result looked like a clown party. So it was a shame to lose the red hair but sacrificing the representation of any single hero was necessary to make the deck match.