[arttorney]

Thanks. I generally get the impression I am not connecting with people all that well on these representational digital art sites. A lot of times I am trying very purposeful things with composition, color, or positive/negative space and I just hear: "bad anatomy ... annoying texture ... bad perspective" so I am apparently not focusing on the same kind of stuff as others do. I appreciate what you've said. Technically, the above is kind of a secondary color triad although the purples are far less dead on and saturated than the oranges and greens. Maybe it is more like alternate complement or something since that's really magenta or thereabouts anyway.

This one below will have several bundled up humans waiting in a loose line to buy barbecued dog bits from this alien, but other than that it's about done.

Something else.

[arttorney]

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[Black-Spot]

There's plenty of space for everyone and I dislike the confines that some people impose on what they consider art. There's a big world out there and I'm sure you'll find your niche.

I liked the 'something else' you posted at CA as well as this one.

[arttorney]

NorthernChild is relatively hot and I felt I had kind of made her look too male or something. I was disappointed about that. I hate being dissatisfied like that.

I am currently working on a version of the Ten of Cups for a tarot deck. I got about five surfer looking dudes to rough in and then I can try to clean up the ugly little pixels.

[arttorney]

An update. I still want to put some white fingernails on the left most woman and then I need to clean up about the six right most people, but here's generally how my version of the ten of cups will look.

Edit: Oh, And I am also doing the Ace of Wands. It's hard not to draw a wand that is a pahllic symbol. Sorry about that.

[arttorney]

Proposed card back for a tarot deck (with dabs of all four suit colors arrayed symmetrically on there).
Those names are the names of my teammates on that other site where we are making tarot cards. The names don't appear on the big "for print" file because then you would be able to tell from behind whether the card was upside down or not, and thereby potentially stack the deck at a reading.

[arttorney]

I hate the face on this guy right now, but this is the general direction the Ace of Wands is going.

[arttorney]

I was trying to stick pretty close to the attributes, symbolism, and divinatory meaning on these cards including such things as featuring the characteristic colors of each of the suits, etc. Over on another place the comment I got was generally that there was not enough design, realism, story. I gather for instance that a video game looking guy riding some sort of a dragon while holding a flaming scepter is more realistic and has more meaning than a flame headed guy coming out of a cloud and drawing his own card with a pencil. These are the little things that elude me. I didn't realize that dragons and post apocalyptic cyborgs are real. I guess I gotta get out more.

[arttorney]

This is not done yet.

[arttorney]

Here's my Three of Pentacles at about actual size.

[Black-Spot]

You've sort of lost the compisitional element on the cards as you go for more detail. I prefered the Ace of Wands on the first page. The 4 swords could be horzontal instead of vertical, thereby filling the space better. Keep puching and don't take everyone's comments to heart.

[arttorney]

I'm done with cards for the time being. and on a break resting up for a rather intense trip to Texas Monday and Tuesday. Thus I don't have any art for this post. I just wanted to share, though. I think this Three of Pentacles I just did is kind of weak, particularly in the foreground faces and the mid-ground landscaping.

For some reason this image in my gallery got as many views in one day than my next most popular work got in a month and a half. This is the only image anybody ever downloaded. I have come to decide that the digital art fan is merely driven by genre considerations. This one had some kind of mecha looking thing and so therefore it must be cool (even though it cannot take off inside a cave and has no wheels to roll it out of the cave, therefore making no sense whatsoever WTF). I am convinced all I have to do is draw a naked cyborg woman licking a banana and I'll be number one with a bullet. She's just gotta have good boobs is all. (everybody'll be all like, "Nice anatomy" "Awesome dude!")

[arttorney]

I'm working on this week's Story Tellers competition. It's kind of supposed to be on the line between a goth romance and a gothic romance.

[Black-Spot]

Not everyone has a DA mentality. Now I don't really understand your latest as it looks like you're hitting your head against a brick wall. I meant to ask, did you do all the edges of the cards yourself?

[arttorney]

I think it's safest to answer no. I have a reference book that contains all the images from the "Derriey Typographic Catalog" from the 1800s. The re-publisher granted a license in the frontispiece to use all the designs in there as long as no more than ten design elements from the book appear in any one piece I create.

Thus, the border around the cards is a scan of a page of that book with all the stuff that had been inside the border erased out. I then went high res and zoomed way in to clean out all the crappy scanner artifacts. I then did color work to what had been a black and white scan. then I placed the actual artwork I made into the central field.

The card back involves about five design elements that I assembled, cleaned, and colored.

About the bricks thing, that is just the framing background. I am about to draw a sort of weird goth couple in there in front of the brick wall. The guy is going to be a little bit like Nosferatu. I guess the gal will have to have a nose ring.
Edit: sort of like this:

After comments we are here. Apparently, stuff that looks like "photoshop filters" is bad. I wonder why I have a tool in my tool box I am not supposed to use. It's like telling me not to use my palette knife.