Mach Induction - TCG Art

I have been waiting for so long to share my work for Legend Story Studios with you guys! They first approached me back in 2018 (around September I think) asking if I’d like to work with them on their TCG Flesh and Blood. They are such nice and professional guys to work with, I always feel at ease, respected and valued as a creative when I work with them. This is only one of five illustrations I’ve done for them so far, unfortunately due to being in lockdown, I don’t have some of the files for the first one I did with them, so I will share that at a later date once I can get back to my other computer.

Due to me not being able to get to my other computer, I can’t quite remember the exact specifics behind this device, and I don’t want to share any misinformation so I’ll update that when I can! One thing that is important though, is that all of the cards I have worked on so far with them, are for a Steampunk based world and characters. They usually provide me with a little run down of what the item on the card is, examples of existing concept art that they have to take inspiration from and any other relevant information. Once I have all of that information, I can begin to start sketching some rough ideas to get over to them.

Steampunk is obviously a very popular theme, especially when it comes to things like concept art and illustration, so I always try to approach it in a little bit of a different way, and not come up with something too obvious. So when I get the brief for these projects, I tend to spend a lot of time researching more hand crafted Steampunk items and figure out how I can best tie relevant elements together in an interesting way. I knew this device had to be cylinder in shape, so I started out doing a few thumbnails, trying to make sure that they’re quite different to each other, that way they have more varied ideas to choose from and potentially combine them if they want to. These are the initial three ideas that I came up with, trying to always think about the function of each element and the device overall.

They picked the one that they liked, so I started to refine it and add any extra details that I thought it needed. I have been doing this for long enough now to probably just take a thumbnail and start doing the line art straight away, making changes as I go, but I prefer to refine the sketch first and add the details at that stage so that I don’t forget anything, because I inevitably will! Once the sketch is refined, I send it off for approval and make any other changes that they’d like until it’s ready to go!

I’m not going to go over my digital process for this as I’ve done it numerous times on the blog (for PUBG and Ratchet and Clank) and also on my Youtube channel, but I will talk about what I was thinking about when painting the piece. First and foremost, I was thinking about the fact that this illustration would eventually end up at a much smaller scale, on a trading card, so things like colour, light, values and shapes were all important when completing the illustration. It’s also very important to show a sort of energy or power to these devices, depending on what they are, so effects are important. I personally also find that backgrounds are more of a secondary in card illustrations, even when they look complex they are usually less detailed and sometimes blurred as you want the focal point to be the item or character.

Here’s the final art on the card too, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see my art on an actual card, something I only dreamed of doing a couple of years ago.

Honestly looking back, I know I could do much better than this now, but at the time this was a really good result for me! I’m sure when I share the next couple of cards that I did with them how much I’ve improved, but I quite like how this turned out overall. By the way, the game is out now, and the art on the other cards and the game itself is beautiful! You can check it out here - https://fabtcg.com/