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#Ghost Cores’ elements and Obsessions have effects on their wings
puppetmaster13u · 2 months
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Prompt 241
Wing au? Wing Au. With perhaps a bit of a twist. Also a hint of eldritchness perhaps. For fun! 
Ghosts have wings. Sure, they aren’t normally seen, not in the visible spectrum, but they do. Scanners pick them up, and sometimes a ghost might even reveal them, which was hypothesized to be some sort of animalistic intimidation attempt. (Something more than one Amity Parker rolled their eyes at)
Everyone had seen them at least once- the motorcycle-driving ghost’s mass of shadowy feathers, the green-haired girls matching shaggy ones, the rocker’s ones that looked like pages of music before bursting into flame. Even the box ghost’s had been spotted- feathers looking more like sheets of cardboard than anything else. 
It wasn’t until the whole kidnapped to the ghost zone that anyone saw Phantom’s, but that was another tale unto itself really. Honestly the arrival of the GIW would have maybe been seen as positive before, but the fact that many of them had looked in the mirror or gone to the doctors only to find feathers beginning to sprout on their back soured it. 
Especially as the GIW continues to prattle on and on about how all ecto-contaminated scum are less than human, less than bacteria. And well, what does that make them? Them, who have been to the realms of the dead and gods and back, touched by the swirling green energy in ways incomprehensible? Changed by that energy? 
So the people silently brush hidden feathers together, quietly rebuff the white-wearing lunatics from the city as best they can, and hope to anything listening that they can stop anyone else from disappearing. That maybe they can find the few no one noticed had been taken before it’s too late, even if they have to tear down the entire government to do it. 
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voicesofchaos · 4 years
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VOC’s Review of the art of Magic The Gathering Core 2021
I an no art expert. Never studied art professionally. But I do consider myself a Vorthros (someone who appreciates the art, story, and flavor of Magic The Gathering). So I have been wanting to this for a while so let’s try it. If this is liked then maybe I will do it again for Zendikar Raising. I’m not going through every card in the set. Just a handful that really stood out to me and I just want to talk about.
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Indulging Patrician by Miranda Meeks
Normally I like to save the best for last but this one is so obviously the best art in the set that I need to lead with it. When I first saw this card revealed my jaw dropped. It is purely captivating! It embodies what vampire artwork wants to be. From the powerful dominant vampire woman in the center, to her poor powerless victim, to the beautiful blood moon behind her, to the swarm of ominous bats, all highlighted with blood. Of course the traditional gender role reversal feels so perfect and not forced here. It is a beautiful artwork and you should want to play Magic just to look at this card. 
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Liliana's Scorn by Josh Hass
We are not moving away from the gothic horror yet though. This is sadly a card that most players will never see as it isn’t in the Core 2021 booster packs but is in the Liliana planeswalker deck. Making this art very easy to overlook but quite impressive when examined. You really feel the struggle of the victim as he fights a losing battle against a horde of zombies. Being in the center you might think he is the protagonist that we cheer on to escape but Liliana even in the backgrounds steals the scene and you know she wins this fight. This is just a great group piece where each individual zombie displays a surprisingly amount of depth which truly makes this piece feel even more hopeless for the poor victim and even more empowering for Liliana.
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Basri's Solidarity by Paul Scott Canavan
Basri Ket is a new planeswalker in the set but instead of looking at him directly let’s check out his magic instead. This is a piece that perfectly embodies cooperation and teamwork, Each figure looks quite a bit different, has a different background, and a different specialization. Yet they are all subtlety bonded together through the sand that basri controls. The way it wraps around and protects them all it a cool and powerful effect.
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Obsessive Stitcher by  Joe Slucher
And we are back to dark and creepy. But I can’t ignore in crazy details in this artwork. On Innistrad, the doctor Frankenstein-like scientists that create ‘zombies’ though alchemy and science rather than straight-up necromancy are called “Stichers”. And this one piece explains all that without any words (except for the 1000 words a picture is worth). The corpses all have different faces showing that this is not simply a construct made from a generic stock but instead were actual living human beings at one point. The ominous green vat behind her is hooked up to them pumping them full of something that can’t be good. Plus we also have ominous test tubes in the background to really hammer in the point of “evil mad scientist”.But then her actual clothes has lots of handy tools to show a devoted craftsman. As she literally stitches thread through not only her diabolic experiment but also her passionate artwork. And finally I did not even notice until seeing the enlarged art but she is missing her right hand! I assume this counts as positive disabled representation right?
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Village Rites by Bud Cook
I promise this is the last dark and creepy card (maybe) on the list but I have to give this one a shout-out. It is a throwback and homage to the card Village Cannibals from Innistrad. Even the same artist. Definitely one of my all-time favorite MTG arts so I am very happy to see a remake of that art! It is nice when Magic throws in the little nostalgia winks randomly.
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Tolarian Kraken by Svetlin Velinov
Magic will often use what they call “Scale Birds” to show how big something is. These are tiny birds near a creature to show how much bigger the creature is than the birds and give a size comparison. Sometimes birds are too small and they use something like “”Scale Deer” or other mammals. Well then those are still too small we now have a “Scale Castle”! What is more terrifying than a Kraken this big! As if that isn’t bad enough it’s brain is actually visible and has like lightning coming from it or something. This feels like a very epic piece where you can feel the motion and terror from it.
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Daybreak Charger by Forrest Imel
The next several arts are going to be under the category of “Things MTG does all the time but needs to make it new each time.” I feel it is most appropriate to start with this unicorn. You see unicorns take occupy a very unique position in both general fantasy genre and pop culture itself. Unicorns are very recognizable so they are very much a great fantasy trope to include. But they also have a reputation of being aimed at “young girls” and in the process made to seem very soft and non-threatening. MTG is a game about combat! You don’t want to summon a gentle non-threatening creature to fight for you but it wants to have unicorn cards. Meaning it wants “badass unicorns!”. Well they absolutely succeed here! But the beautiful thing is they need to over-correct. It wasn’t necessary to paint it all black and cover it in blood. We don’t need to put it on a heavy metal album cover to show its fierce side. Instead bright light is used in a way that makes it seem comforting but also powerful and not to be messed with. This is a unicorn that you are relieved to be on your side and terrified of seeing on your opponent’s side. That takes serious talent to bring it all together! 
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Chandra's Incinerator by  Craig J Spearing
First I apologize that this art is a little cropped from the original. What is another thing that shows up all the time in fantasy art? FIRE! It gets hard to draw fire so often and make it feel different. This is a fire elemental so that is a bit different but still something we have seen a lot. The card Fire Elemental was in the very first Magic set. That card has had 4 different artworks and 3 other cards have some for of Fire Elemental in their name (Deepfire Elemental, Firefiend Elemental, and Wildfire Elemental). This one is clearly meant to be a nostalgic nod to the original art and it works so well! The fire is so detailed and intimidating but the creature is very expressive. It is very refreshing to see yet another Fire Elemental in such a new fashion and perspective.
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Terror of the Peaks by Andrey Kuzinskiy
How many times have we seen a dragon in MTG? Over 200 times!! This set alone has 3 dragons! We have seen zombie dragons, skeleton dragons, dragons who breath lightning, dragons that breath frost, dragons covered in metal, and all kinds of other dragons. But sometimes you just need to go back to basics. But basics do not need to be boring. As we see here this is an awesome basic dragon that embodies everything you think of when you think of dragons yet still blows you away with how awesome it is! This is quality dragon art
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Shacklegeist by Igor Kieryluk
Ghosts and spirits are again a common trope that gets redone a lot. I really like how this piece can just take a mundane object with some symbolism behind it and just make an entirely new creature from it. This is basically a giant lock with ominous chains attached being held by a specter and it all works so well together! This art style being more watercolors is a nice final touch to give this piece a spooky feeling but also a really cool feeling too.
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Rousing Read by Campbell White
I am going to end this with a bit of a weird piece but I didn’t want to leave it out. This is apparently a follow-up to the card Hard Cover from the core set before. This guy has magical wings made from the pages of a book! Like I don’t have anything else to add. That is cool enough by itself.
Special Mentions
Alchemist's Gift, Chandra Heart Of Fire, Garruk’s Uprising, Peer Into The Abyss, and Sanguine Indulgence. All cards with awesome art but I don’t want this post to go on forever (and some of them I couldn’t find good clean versions of just the art). Please tell me what art from Core 2021 I missed that you really liked!
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callistochan87 · 3 years
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In June, I "attended" a local writers' festival (through Zoom). The only panel I managed to attend, because I totally didn't forget about the other panel I'd signed up for on the Saturday, was a writers' workshop with Richard Van Camp. I'd just come off a week of the online Association of Canadian Archivists conference, which was of the "sit back and watch" model, so when he went around asking everyone to talk about their projects and why we were here it was very much, oh, I have to talk. i did not expect that.
Richard Van Camp seems to have boundless energy and enthusiasm, for everything. In hindsight, it was very refreshing, but at the time, oh shit,. People are talking about things That Matter to them and here I am.
I don't remember the specifics of what I said. I don't even remember if I actually gave a plot summary, unlike literally everyone else. I don't even know if I can adequately summarize it any more. But the gist of it was that I was hashing out and re-hashing the same ideas, and finding it difficult to reign in my words, leading to bloated wordy chapters that were a chore to write and forced me to bloat subsequent chapters to get in all the necessary info--in short, I was spinning my wheels and not going anywhere, and frustrated.
He immediately suggested a graphic novel format. In a subsequent email, he said that GNs pare things down to core scenes, so it makes sense in that regard--if I'm having trouble writing concisely, adopting a format that forces me to do so would be a solution. He suggested I print out my current manuscript and basically pick out the core scenes. I did not tell him my current manuscript was unfinished, and that I'd been dabbling in tweaking the base idea even more than what I'd already written (of which I've already decided to do now, but at the time I was still on the fence.)
Other things he suggested:
- Renegade Arts Entertainment, a publisher he apparently has a working relationship with, might be interested
- Read Brian K. Vaughan's Saga as it is sci-fi
- Email him the script when I was done and it was the best I could make it (he said this same advice to everyone)
I read Saga, and generally enjoyed it (still salty about the "year-long" hiatus that ended on a FUCKING CLIFFHANGER). Not sure I'd want to make CS like that but it did tell me I didn't have to be so obsessed with making things accurate. Saga has robots that look like humans with television heads, the ghosts of killed children, a wide variety of talking animals or insects that are aliens, a wide variety of different types of humans with one unusual element (horns or wings or amphibious) that are also aliens, a rocket ship that's literally a giant tree, and landscapes that effectively look like, you know, a big city.
Not the aesthetic I want for CS specifically, but it did show me I can do whatever I want and it's fine. I want some hippie futuristic aesthetic, I can fucking go for it. I want bright eye-searing colours, fuck yeah.
As for the art, when I said I could draw, and had drawn these characters before, Richard informed me that I'd basically done half the work that a hired artist would do. I could just write the script and hire an artist, But looking at Renegade Arts' submission guidelines, I could also...just...do it myself? (I don't know if my work fits their submission guidelines. They look to mostly publish horror or Canadiana-themed works, and CS really isn't either one of those.)
Despite me bingeing on webcomics, despite me looking up ways on How To Comic, I don't know if I'd be able to go ahead and do it. Not so much the artistic ability (although yes, that plays a role--dynamism is not my forte) but mostly the time to do it. I suppose I wouldn't know until I try.
BUT really, the art is the second half of the issue. I still need to write the damn thing first, and That is Goal Number One now. Just write the damn script. See if a pro author thinks it's decent. Get that done, then worry about whether or not to draw or hire or anything like that.
(I have not done that yet, obviously. I don't want to wait until November to do it, but I have yet to finish writing up the plot outline and breaking it down into scenes like I said I would. It's the middle, man. The middle drags.)
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That being said, I still wanted to see what it might look like if I tried. I have Clip Studio Paint Pro, and it's apparently designed for comics/manga creators. There are some useful tools I never bothered to explore, like how it automatically makes panels and speech balloons for you, blocks out individual panels, etc.
I don't like Clip Studio's inking tools as much as Affinity Designer or Procreate, mostly because my usual pen stabilizing tool does NOT work with Clip's mechanics, and my hands shake too much. I'm sure this is inexperience. but inking this was a trial. I'm glad I worked at 600 dpi like I saw someone suggest. Once you shrink down the errors are less noticeable.
Other nice features:
- You can set your inks as a reference layer, open a new layer, and if you use the right settings in the Magic Wand tool, it will select areas based on the inks, even if you'r enot on the inks layer
- Has a TOOOOOOOOON of free 3D models, which I blatantly used for poses
- Also has 3D backgrounds you can use for reference
- Some of the actual brushes are nice if you like the traditional media look
I saw this tutorial and got GUNG HO about generating a good background--the 3D model takes care of the perspective and everything, and there's nothing saying I can't cheat for sped when I'm making comics-type stuff. But oh. Wait. That feature is only in the high-end Clip Studio Paint EX version. But don't worry! Because I have Pro, I can upgrade to EX for a discounted price...of 160 USD.
Basically they took the price of EX and subtracted the price of Pro, which is considerably cheaper. $160 USD comes out to something like $215 CAD, and I...I just really don't know if I can justify that right now. Or for a while.
So I just traced it like an idiot. This is not nearly as complex as the original 3D model would've been, but it gets the gist of it.
Long story short, I'm balking at paying over $200 CAD when I eventually had to wind up converting it to PSD and finalizing the colours/shading in Photoshop anyway. Not that the shading is great--I went for speed more the time, compared to this image (the last time I did cell shading). But if I'm using JUST this to generate linework for backgrounds, is it really worth it? I could just trace. It'd be a real PITA, but I did it here. If I ever figure out how to use SketchUp, I could just use that too (I do not know how to use SketchUp).
I don't know. But I did try to do as much of this in Clip Studio as I could. The cell shading doesn't look as horrible with it shrunk down like this, but it's still not...great. I struggled to figure out a good 'style' to draw this in, and settled for...I don't know if it's just Chris who turned out weird due to the perspective or what.
Although Caelis' perspective was fun. Thank goodness for those 3D models; they're a bitch to pose with a mouse, but once they're in place they're so useful. You can even specify the height and body type and it adjusts the model accordingly, so Caelis got to be a skinny beanpole as intended.
I also like the weird AI-generated colour fill. It gives you some weird, weird settings, as AI does, but when I played around with the layer settings, it highlights Chris' face with an eerie green glow, and gave Caelis some weird highlights omn his hair that rather made his hair look like it could glow in the dark. So I kept it at a very weak opacity and Soft Light solely for ~aesthetic~ Not perfect by any means, but it has that mood lighting and stark contrast, I like it XD
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That second sheet is actually the first sheet, drawn like the weekend after the workshop, where I was...I was overthinking, as I usually do, and trying to get ideas down for a new (tweaked) plot in a coherent way when I started doodling. Experimenting. Nothing major, just to see if I could draw expressions. Some turned out great, others not so much (both from idea and execution POV), but they don't have to be good.
I wouldn't have considered this worthy to upload this on its own, but since I'd already done a cell shading comic practice piece (which is all it was - if I draw this as a comic, I would probably redraw this scene), I might as well. Playing with some stuff. Konnie's hair shift was basically:
- she would look good with short hair
- she'd probably WANT short hair anyway
- if I have to draw something over and over, it'd damn well better be simple and easy to draw, and Konnie's braid can get finicky
also I am not opposed to Eric with glasses AT ALL. i feel like this means I should take Shelby's away to compensate, but I also like the idea of twins who are not identical, but have identical crap-quality vision
but yes, while I'm still undecided, graphic novel might fit the bill. I've always drawn these characters, which doesn't make sense for a published book with words, but would make sense for an illustrated format. If nothing else, I'm willing to give it a shot and see what happens.
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