Tag: Card Design

2019, Portraits

The Tuomas Holopainen Project

Miss Escapist

Now that I‘ve finally finished the Tuomas Holopainen card design, I can write a blog-post about the process of creating both – the Tuomas drawing itself and the card. I could have written something about the drawing before but as the two belong together, it just made sense for me to wait with this a little longer.

It all started with the idea of creating a new metal king card – for Tuomas. As I haven’t had any proper drawing to use for it, I decided it would be best to do a completely new drawing. I had found my reference photo quite quickly and my first intention was to start drawing with a ballpoint pen (as that had worked out for the cards quite well in the past). I started drawing Tuomas but stopped doing so somewhere in the middle of the process as it just didn’t look right in my eyes. So, I started all over again, this time with pencils. Suddenly, the drawing process got much smoother and I was way more satisfied with what I was creating there.

After having finished drawing Tuomas (which was pretty easy going after I had made the decision to use pencils instead of a ballpoint pen), I first intended to immediately start with designing the card. But as I liked the finished portrait so much, I wanted to “complete” it with a proper background. Instead of doing a realistic background drawn with pencils, I had the idea of adding something dreamier. I got out my acrylic colours and a separate sheet of paper and painted it in a bluish tone. I added sprinkles of white colour to give it a galaxy sort of look. Then, I used a gel pen to write the titles of some Nightwish songs on top of it all. Last but not least I cut out the Tuomas drawing and glued it onto the newly created “Nightwish galaxy” and done was the Tuomas Holopainen portrait.

I was pretty satisfied with the finished portrait and therefore didn’t really dare touching it again to create the card. Also, I was lacking inspiration and so it took me quite some time to get back to it. I started doing the design two or three times but stopped again because I didn’t like the result. One day at work I finally had the sparkling idea and couldn’t wait to transform it into a card as soon as I got back home. This time, the creation process only took a few hours as I already had the idea set in my mind. First, I edited the scan of Tuomas’ portrait into the required symmetrical form and added it to a blanc card. Next, I drew the pendulum symbol and the stardust using Autodesk Sketchbook. I changed their colour quite often, finally ending up with a purple tone that seemed to fit quite well. The last thing to add on top were the music notes and after a bit of finetuning and rearranging the card was done as well.

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils, acrylic colours, white gel pen, Autodesk Sketchbook, GIMP

Time: approx. 12 hours

2019, Portraits

Metal Kings – Tomi Joutsen of Amorphis

Miss Escapist

“When the dawn is bright and new
And the day is full of hope
It’s easy to continue your journey
Like a king on his royal way”

Amorphis – Death of a King

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

2019, Portraits

Simone Simons Card Design

Miss Escapist

“Only you is what you’ll be
All you are is what you see”

Epica – The Holographic Principle

Every now and then I pick up someone’s birthday as an opportunity to start a new portrait – and in this case, it’s Simone Simons again. I immediately thought of the metal queen card designs that I had done before as Simone definitely deserves a spot in the list of my favourite metal ladies. As I had just bought myself a new convertible, this also gave me the perfect excuse for trying out Autodesk Sketchbook on it. I had never drawn digitally before, so it was bound to become a challenge right from the start. Doing the first sketch wasn’t so very complicated but getting the shadings right was. It took me quite some time to get used to the new drawing dynamic and although the convertible also reacts to applied pressure changes it’s not quite the same than it would’ve been with a pencil. All of the lines that I drew were either too soft or too harsh in the beginning. I slowly started getting used to it, though, and the final result didn’t look as bad as I had feared. I took the finished portrait and edited it to match the blanco card design, then I added a few extra details and the Epica logo before I was finally done

Materials: Autodesk Sketchbook

Time: approx. 8 hours

Reference photo used for the drawing was taken by: Tim Tronckoe

2018, Portraits

Designing Cards

Miss Escapist

Maria Brink

In This Moment

Alissa White-Gluz

Arch Enemy

Floor Jansen

Northward & Nightwish

The idea for turning some of my drawings into card designs was actually born quite a while ago – to be more precisely, after I had drawn Maria Brink. I edited the drawing digitally to get it into a proper symmetrical form and then added a card layout to it. I never properly uploaded the picture, though. Same goes for the Alissa White-Gluz card, I created it a few months later and it also never found its way online. I just never felt like anyone would be interested in these cards as they were basically just an edit of drawings that already existed. As the end of the year was coming closer, I decided to give it a try and uploaded my first card design – and got an overwhelmingly positive response. So I felt encourage to upload the second card as well and even create a third card right away – Floor Jansen. I used the Northward drawing that I had done before for the edit. To my surprise, when I opened Instagram again after uploading that card, the first thing that I saw was my work – on Floor Jansen’s page. She seemed to have stumbled upon it and even liked it enough to repost it on her profile. Needless to say that I was rather speechless about this and felt very honoured.

Materials: GIMP, Autodesk Sketchbook

Time: approx. 5 hours

Reference photo used for the drawing were taken by: Jeremy Saffer (Maria Brink), Tim Tronckoe (Alissa White-Gluz), Northward album cover (Floor Jansen)