New Magic Card Alteration – Prime Speaker Zegana

Here is the most recent of my card alterations, commissioned by the same person who commissioned the “My Little Titans” set I posted about previously. Needless to say, I had a much more enjoyable time working on this card, since its subject matter is much more closely aligned to my usual style of work. Not that it was completely without hiccups – I tend to work on multiple card alterations at once, and for a while this one was my biggest frustration of the batch. But as often happens with these, the frustration really boiled down to a lack of clarity in vision – in this case, how to solve the visual problem of integrating the lower half of the card with Zegana’s side fins. Since I always start from the art that is already there and extend it in some way, even with radical alterations like the Titan set, and since I don’t generally do alterations that obscure the text, any area of the card where the original art cannot easily and logically be extended to the border without painting over the text can be a challenge. What also often happens with my art projects is that the solution to the stumbling block is something really simple, that comes to me in a sudden flash when I have given up on forcing a solution BUT haven’t given up on looking at the image (in other words, I have to walk the fine line of ignoring the need for a solution but not ignoring the project). And as soon as that happens, the image is completed very quickly, sometimes after what can seem like a ridiculously long incubation time. In this case, the incubation time wasn’t too long, thankfully. 😉