Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Double-shifts - Illustrations for the Dead Justice Death Marshal cards in m2e

I decided some time ago that Wyr'd cards were distinctly lacking a few, and now that I've had some experience getting them printed, I finally was up to tackling this design (and needed a break).

Tara's introduction in m2e created a problem with the Nightmare Edition Death Marshals, which was then compounded her totem's new upgrade found in the wave 2 arsenal decks. While the Dead Justice minis used to be either fake zombie Guild minis or actually dead Resurrectionist minis, Tara created a gap, where they could represent either in a single crew.

This isn't that hard to fix by just explaining it to my opponent ("Okay, this Death Marshal is a Guild Autopsy, while this Death Marshal is a Death Marshal...") and putting the appropriate card next to each mini, but that's boring, time consuming, easy to forget, easy to get mixed up and, more to the point, not very cool looking.

So, in response, I decided to make new cards for all of the minis, reproducing Wyrds style. These cards are the result, and I'm quite happy with how they came out. They could have been slightly closer (no second blood splatter, and the texture isn't a perfect match, though the layout should be), but I ultimately decided that it was best for them to be slightly different than the official ones, because I didn't want people to feel like the cards were trying to get passed off as real (i.e. I'd somehow cheated) when they weren't.

(I also had a lot of fun making the Death Marshals with their modified status and own very special breed of "dual faction"...)

However, there weren't any color illustrations of the cards, so I decided that it was best to, instead of using photos (since that went out of fashion around the third book...), I'd try to push myself ("break, "remember) and get reasonably close to shading and coloring in Wyrd's style, so the portraits you see on all these cards are from scans I took of the line sketches on the 1st edition cards, which I then colored myself.

I'm quite happy with the result, and feel that any inconsistencies in the style were masked when reduced to the size of these cards.
These should all be printable, and should be scaled to 2.75x3.75". The additional space is because they're designed to be printed with a card manufacturer, so need the standard 1/8" bleed.

Which brings me to the legal stuff:
I'm not selling these or the designs, or attempting to infringe in any way on Wyrd's copyrights. These are fan art that I'm getting professionally printed for my own collection only, and I'm putting the images up in case others want to print their own.

If you're going to show these, please give proper credit and link back, and don't just steal the image set (a lot of work went in to these), thanks.
I'm not including the back illustrations, as emphasis that I'm not intending to step on any toes at Wyrd. If Wyrd gives the official go-ahead, I'll put those up, too, but not before.

EDIT: oh, and the original scans:


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