Tag: Metal Queen

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)