drawing proxies and altering cards is my chief magic sub-hobby. Ive done probably over 300 of them since I started playing way back in fall 2003, many of which I either sold or gave away. Ive managed to track down and post about 250 to my website, and I keep making new ones:
http://community.webshots.com/user/rovromanmultiple people have requested I write tutorial how I do this. be warned this is very detailed and technical. I am a huge geek and I spend hours doing this for my own amuseument.
for this article, I will walk through my process for making nice mana drain proxies:
vroman Mana Drainreal mana drainas side note; Mana drain is what I would consider simple art. Its one object pictured in fairly uniform background. same with moxen, Lotus, and Workshop. As compared to say Time Walk or Bazaar where theres multiple detailed objects or figures of interest and complicated background. the Wotc art policy over the years has progressively gotten farther away from "simple" art. most cards now are involved scenes, or atleast have engaging scenery.
On the sample card I started with legends Spectral Cloak. however, Ive recently acquired large stack of Boomerangs, so all my future Drain proxies will have one less instance of my scratchy handwriting. I of course recommend legends Boomerang, but any black bordered UU instant will do if you're willing to ignore, or re-draw the expansion symbol, and dont care about slightly off color frame. Ive done at least one drain proxy on Muddle the Mixture just for the new-frame effect; so the base card is fairly flexible.
step 1 is erasing entire text box, art frame, and title text. rarely some background or text elements will match sufficiently to salvage from base card, but not here. When they do match, its often more trouble than its worth to erase around them. I use Sanford Ink/Pencil eraser (half grey/white parallelogram, aprox 2" long) for bulk of frame. Then standard pencil eraser to remove last few millimeters of ink up to edge of frame. Its best to use fairly new eraser to get nice corner angle for carefully pulling off exactly right amount of ink. I usually need fresh pencil after every 3 or 4 cards. pen-style mechanical erasers are not very good at heavy duty ink erasing, so youre pretty much stuck wasting lots of pencils. Erasing is tiresome and not fun, especially doing very careful job, but necesary.
step 2 is replacing erased text box and title bar with standard frame color. for text box (and most backgrounds in general) I use highlighters, specifically Sanford Major Accent. Do not use dry-erase markers. highlighters put on very light layer of color, so I cover the entire erased area with one base coat of light blue. Then, using same marker, I dab few jagged horizontal lines and finger smear them into fading waves. repeat until the wave pattern is dark enough to match the printed background. smearing smoothes the darker colors into the desired pattern and eliminates the little bead dots of wet ink that always are left behind with any markers. I always at least slightly smear every marker line I draw, to prevent beading and choppy color bands. any real borders I go back over with ballpoint. I keep paper towel and water bottle at hand to frequently clean my fingers, which constantly get ink stained. otherwise, smearing different colors subsequently would get muddy fast. for thicker ink like paint markers, I use cotton swab instead of fingers to more precisely guide it into correct position.
step 3 is creating background areas and color blocks. for mana drain there are two background zones and one primary foreground object. have either real reference card in front of you, or correctly scaled image on your computer screen, and roughly measure the boundaries of the major zones and translate them in pencil on the card. I have fancy artists T-square, but any ruler will do. in this case, diagonal line separating seabed from ocean, and tilted oval blob slightly low of center. the ocean is predominantly green shade, and the mana-squid and seabed both have green highlights. thus I first cover the entire art frame with light green highlighter. for most detail areas, I will be using sharpies and other permanent markers, which in many places will completely cover the background color. the point of laying down the base highlighter color is so if I miss any spots, deliberately or accidently, the gaps will show through as lighter shades of the top color, not white of bare cardstock, thus the eye will fill them in as colored.
After filling the whole square with light green, I use pink ("Rose") highlighter and fill in the mana-squid oval, the pink/green interaction might get kind of muddy, but dont worry, these colors are still too light to impact the sharpie layer that goes on next. I have yet to find brown highlighter, so for seabed base shading, I use one of my many brown shades provided by the politically correct Crayola "multi-cultural" washable fat markers. there are 8 of these that supposedly represent the range of skin tones found in humans worldwide, but labelled innocuously like "beige" and "mahogany", instead of "aryan" and "negro". anyway, they are very useful for anything remotely brown; wood, cloth, dirt, skin, etc. like all washable crayolas, they smear and blend easily, always a plus. I think for the mana drain seabed I used "terra cotta".
note: for "complex" art I usualy skip this step, bc mostly there arent any large enough areas of any one predominant color to justify highlighter backgrounds. I just detail pencil everything and proceed to final coloring.
Step 4 is drawing the central object in pencil. This is the most difficult step if youre not naturally talented artist. my only advice is to always do eye tracing practice sketches from the real card. I have sketch notebook full of practice drawings from all my cards. the good news is since the only ink laid down so far is highlighter, you can still easily erase anything and re-do sections, and the final sharpie will hide earlier mistakes. if you are struggling getting the scale and details right, you can make extensive use of your ruler to find precisely how far apart different parts of the drawing are. basically you can plot the X,Y coordinates of every major intersection; ie where each tentacle meets the ground; where the curves start inflecting and so on. I usually just work off my initial background color zone, or at most plot one or two key reference points, and eyeball the rest. if you look through all my drain proxies on my site, theres considerable variation, but they all look basically correct.
if this also fails, go take drawing classes. after you've sketched out the mana-squid, its time for more color.
Step 5 is coloring the main object. for this step the primary tools are Sharpies. I own what I think is every color that company has ever made (35+ unique colors?). Especially vital are the gold/silver/copper ones (the golds run out fast so buy like 3 of them) and the dark/medium/light wood touch up markers. I think you can buy 30 packs now that have all the secondary colors like several shades of pink, muddy yellow (ochre?), olive (military style), etc. I prefer the twin-tip kinds but they only come in the standard colors. I also am fond of crayola thin washable markers bc they smear very evenly. esp grey and black crayola markers are very helpful to give options besides black sharpie for dark areas. lastly, paint markers (I use Uni-Paint Fine line) are fairly essential for putting light color on top of black; esp yellow, white, orange, red, and metals.
as for the technique. remember, in drawing everything is at least two colors. even flatly painted cube has shaded side and lit side, and most objects are far more complex. whatever color you decide something is, pick lighter shade and darker shade of the same color and use all 3 on the object. For the mana-squid notice there is thin line of bright whitish-green along the top, then band of pinkish-red, then most the body is light pink, which fades directly into dark black shadows. mixed in the shadow region are green ocean highlights. then on the underbelly are random protrusions that show up as the same pink-red as above. I would use several layers of rose highlighter for the light pink middle section, then use some combination of pink and red sharpie to blend out the top layer. remember, always finger smear every line to get rid of beading. just barely tapping the card with the tip of your pinky will pick up enough of the excess ink, and then wipe it off on paper towel. the thin highlight along the top is probably skipable, bc it would only come out right by using white paint marker, and its impossible to make paint marker line that thin. that highlight line is my least favorite part of the sample card I linked.
The shadows I start with black crayola for smearing into the pink, then black sharpie for all the interior deep black shadows. on the tentacles, start with rose highlighter, then add alternating red/black stripe. the area the tentacle sinks into the seabed is tricky, and I like to do that after finishing the background. lastly take green paint marker and dab at the highlights over the shadows. also theres single yellow dot on its tail tentacle, for which I used paint marker again.
Step 6 is outlining the central object. I just use black ballpoint pen and go over all the borders of the main object to define it and bring it out to foreground of attention. Even if you do good job keeping color zones separate, on this small scale of drawing, adding black border lines is necessary (even if the original art doesnt have them) or else foreground objects will get visually lost. bc we dont have the luxury of starting on huge canvas and shrinking the picture mechanically, its too dificult to get the subtle shading differences that would ordinarily pop the foreground out in the viewers eye. so I have to cheat and erect glaring black walls around what I want them to be looking at. I have red, blue and green ballpts also for times when I really dont want black line on the drawing. in this case, black ballpt suitably extends off the mana-squid's shadows.
Step 7 is finishing the background color. first pencil in the little ovals of the floating blobs and fill them with red sharpie, then circle in black pallpt. I use dark green sharpie for most the ocean. to get the darker wavy pattern, my trick is to kind of stab at the card at an angle, making short stubby line, then immediately pinky smudge it, and repeat over and over. its thicker along the horizon, then spaces out higher up. for the seabed, I randomly do the same thing with brown and green sharpie, and smear in some black crayola. then take white paint marker and make big blob where the sun is shining through in upper left quadrant, smearing it out w finger or swab. any residual white paint on my finger, I dab on the left red blob for its top highlight, and green paint marker the bottom highlight. after background is done, I draw in the glare points where the tentacles sink into seabed. For this I semi-sucessfully tried using thin tip red sharpie, basically by firmly scrubbing the point back and forth until the tip soaked up the existing black/brown/green ink. then I scribbled with the red sharpie on scratch paper until the muddy junk bled off, and repeated until I got through with the red to the base of the card. then I added some yellow. this is obviously hard on your markers, but I go through them fairly quickly anyway so I dont care.
Step 8 is writing all the text. I use thin tip black sharpie for all card text, and sign it in thick tip. I write all the text last so it wont smudge as my palm inevitably rubs on the card while Im drawing. On the text box I persoanlly like to succinctly summarize the card's function, rather than write strict oracle text, or worse, literally transcribe printed text. Ive been asked why I dont have fancy artist's signature. truth is I seriously do not know how to write cursive. I changed schools many times in grade school and I somehow never got taught cursive, and never found a reason to learn. more importantly I want to be immediately recognizable as the creater of the card, and not have people puzzle over some obtuse scrawl.
so thats the plan. with my infinite amount of practice, I can usually produce a solid proxy in under 2 hours. for card alterations, theres much more planning, coming up with creative theme, find reference pictures, plot out entirely new composition, carefully erase around original art Im keeping, blend my drawing into existing colors, etc. hopefully this has been somewhat understandable and educational. feel free to email any questions or show me links to your own cards. please dont use webcams or shaky digital cameras.
