Metal King – Miss Escapist Art

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

“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

Tag: Metal King

The Tuomas Holopainen Project

Metal Kings – Tomi Joutsen of Amorphis