Magic Card Alter

Please meet Sakura-tribe Elder, the third card I’ve altered with acrylic paints (I specify acrylic, as more than one magic card has received a sharpie mustache from me). I still remain largely uncertain about altering cards, but I feel this is one of my favorites that I’ve done in my little experiments. I’ve considered myself an artist for hardly a year now but I feel I made leaps and bounds in that time. One of the most interesting things regarding altering magic cards is the surprising lack of transferable skills from more traditional forms of art e.g. landscape painting.

 One would think that painting is always painting but this is really not the case. To be fair, color mixing skills and the ability to discern details are needed for both, but they differ in several areas. When approaching a painting, rarely does one have to be able to perfectly match the colors of your inspiration photo. Artists cheat colors. The entire concept of the extremely popular impressionism style is based upon the idea of embellishing color. With an alter, you spend most of your time mixing colors. Also, in painting you generally get more than ½ an inch to work in.

Another key difference lies in the decision process. When painting from your head, you can paint anything you want, but obviously Sakura-Tribe Elder does not want a border of cows and blue sky. Interestingly enough altering differs ever more substantially than painting from a photograph. When you stare into the borders, there is no predefined way to paint them. Conversely, a photograph is really a set of directions that tells you what to paint and precisely where to do so. I have the option of neglecting any detail I want when doing an alter. The portion directly above the Name Bar was the most difficult for me, partly because of such reasons. I had to both imagine how it would look with ¼ of an inch of space separating them, while basing that thought in the details I was already provided. In reality doing an alter takes more decisions and time per square inch than traditional or abstract painting.

In terms of the actually alter at hand, I really enjoy the sides of Sakura-tribe Elder. I loosely brushed a dark brown in to give the impression that the branch extended into a cloud of greens. The foliage was fairly easy as none of it had a defined shape. I don’t know how I feel about the top, or what I would do to improve it. Mostly it was a tad overworked and slightly off design-wise. Finally I feel I could have done a better job blending the black bottom and the greens. In spite of all that, it had an overall high-quality look to it.