Black Phantom Chronicles Card Deck Behind the Scenes Part 2

 
October 10, 2016

Painting Dilemmas


As a card deck heavily reliant on painting, my project is progressing somewhat slowly. Painted masterpieces are not things that can be rushed, and unlike working with computers, there is no undo button. With paints, there is not even the eraser of a pencil. Perhaps a mistake can be painted over; sometimes it cannot and if it cannot, the painting might require starting from scratch. I use Photoshop to fix some of those errors, rather than scrapping hours of work, but the intimidation of that fatal mistake can be time consuming in and of itself.



Actually, I did not have too much trouble with intimidation or mistakes (nothing that could not be fixed in Photoshop) until this last character painting, the character of Lisya. The fact that she has been this much trouble was a surprise after the last four, and yet, since she is the enchantress, the slowness was somewhat expected. I drew three different rough sketches before I was even remotely happy with any of them. When I could not seem to draw a likable rough sketch I actually switched the week I said I would paint her with the week I was supposed to paint the king, just to accomplish more before I came to the harder part. From there, I blackened the back of the sketch that I liked the best with charcoal, placed it, black side down, over paper capable of holding water, and traced what I had previously drawn onto the paint-worthy surface.



Since then, it has been slow progress to make the lighting right, the details clear, and so forth. Out of the one week that the other paintings took, this one is taking two. I hope it does not take three. This naturally alters the timetable and I will have to make up for it later, somewhere, but, on the plus side, it could be worse. I could be doing all of the frames, or borders, myself. Right now, I just have to paint them, thanks to Stephani, who was nice enough to volunteer her help from day one.


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