Metal Kings – Tomi Joutsen of Amorphis

After having drawn multiple metal queen cards, I felt like it was finally time to give the male part of the genre some well recognition, too. So why not start a metal king series? And I knew exactly who was going to be the first one to get a card: Tomi Joutsen, singer of Amorphis. I had done a portrait drawing of him last year and to me that drawing just seemed to fit perfectly for a card design. Luckily, I had a good scan of the drawing on my notebook and was able to start editing right away. First step was to erase the background, as I didn‘t want it in the card. After that I went on with bring the portrait into a symmetrical shape. It took me quite some time to figure out how to do that most elegantly because I didn’t want the print on his shirt to look cut off. Instead, I wanted the prints of each side to flow into each other. When I finally had my symmetrical Tomi, I added him to the empty card template. Now it was time for creativity work. I knew that the symbol I wanted to use in the frame was Ukko’s hammer as it’s a symbol often found in Amorphis‘ works. Furthermore, as a little contrast to Tomi’s rather death metal like appearance, I added some floral ornaments to the frame. The ornaments are also referring to the album „Silent Waters“ where you can find a similar arrangement on the album cover. I hoped it would emphasize the contrast often found in Amorphis‘ music – the coexistence of heaviness and growls but also clear singing and beautiful melodies. I was almost done with the card, but felt like something was still missing. All other cards that I had done before have a colorful accent found somewhere in the picture. I wasn’t really sure how to do that here. After sleeping over it for a night, inspiration finally found me. On the album cover of „Under the Red Cloud“, you can see a spiral pattern with a texture that resembles snakeskin. So I drew a very similar arrangement to embed Tomi. Colorwise, I wasn’t sure whether to pick a dark red or a more bluish tone. After trying both, I decided to go with red. As a last and final touch, I made Ukko’s hammer red as well. And there it was – the first metal king card.

Materials: Autodesk Sketchbook (+ Faber Castell blacklead pencils for the portrait)

Time: approx. 3 hours (only for the card design, drawing the portrait took 8 hours)

Reference photo used for the drawing was taken by: Lina Glasir