Thank you! I think the Charizard was somewhere between 7-10 hours at a rough guess. Most of the time is cutting up the broken pieces and arranging them. The Yugioh equivalents are easily double due to the more complex artwork. The Dragon Master Knight for example: every section of each neck is individually cut and stacked up. It’s tough to fully show in flat pictures tbh.
I enjoy just getting crazier and more detailed with each one. Taking a look at an art, deciding what to do with it and then finding lots of ways to take it further and add in extra bits of detail on the fly. Currently working on a Ho-oh piece and I’ve condemned myself to trying to make all the feathers on a Sugimori art look individual.
Wow, this is super impressive. Pokemon aside, your YuGiOh work is just mind-blowing. I have seen some of these videos and the details on some cards can be painstaking, so the ones which highlight the character breaking out of the frame are just awesome . Really superb showcase my friend.
Thank you! Yes, I design them all myself. As long as I can get a full version of the art at a high enough resolution without any key parts being cropped off, I can try something. All of the broken bits and pieces I tend to make up as a I go along and just enjoy doing it. The Charizard, for example, I didn’t plan on including the claw marks or the tail until I was making it.
I did initially want to make it with Base Set Charizard art but I couldn’t find it uncropped, clean, and high res. Sometimes I find fan art from others that may work but I don’t like to use other people’s stuff.
These pieces are sick! I always though Yugioh was a better TCG for these shadowbox pieces, mostly because of all the finer details in the art, and your works really show it. The ones with the art breaking out of the card are insanely creative and really great looking. Carving out the spaces in the runic circle on The Dark Magicians card looks difficult but is such good attention to detail.
What’s going on with the Skyla one? It looks like the backmost layer is one of those acetoned holographic cards, but it seems to be reflecting the actual image of Skyla. Do you have a reverse image on the back of the Skyla piece sticking out?
And just out of curiosity, for the ones where you have to extend outside the card, do you print on cardstock? And how do you print them (they look pretty high quality)?
I still have yet to try my first one, but it’s still on my list of things to do (if I ever get around to it ).
So, the Skyla: the back layer is an acetone-cleared cosmos holo with a pink translucent filter sheet layered over the top to change the colour. There is indeed another full-size mirrored version of Skyla glued to the back of the main one. Usually I don’t need to bother with this but the holo was SO reflective and such a large space that you could see all of the “behind the scenes” work.
I actually didn’t think it was too bad until I’d completed the card and subsequently had to (very carefully!) pull Skyla off the card, print out a mirrored/flipped version of the art and fit it. Obviously, it didn’t fit perfectly since the front one is made up lots of different shaped pieces so there was some trimming involved.
I’ve since settled on more elegant solutions such as colouring the backs of the pieces black or gluing the copies I cut onto black card first before cutting them out. The black doesn’t seem to reflect details of the joins as much and it looks more like a solid shadow.
To print the art I use a satin 260gsm photo paper which gives good quality, has a nice matte surface, and is thick enough so that the bits remain sturdy like card. I use Photoshop to resize the art down but you need to turn resampling off when resizing to maintain sharpness/quality of the image when working with JPEGs at least.
Finished this Articuno over the weekend. It is very loosely a 151 Articuno but all that is really left is the front layer. Went for lots of cosmos, a slight Gold Star-ey look with the artwork boundary being broken, and I also etched/engraved the reverse foil details.
With builds like this, I just tend to try and make what I want to see myself.
Yeah, this is the first time I’ve done it (been putting off trying it for a while) and I have a few different tools lined up to experiment with to try and get an even better finish. What some people can do is incredible. I have seen people add complete texture to normally ‘flat’ half arts and regular illustration rares and I’d love to try and do the same.
@cyberurchin Oh man, I love this one—looks like it could be an actual illustration rare! And that Virizion near the signature is a cool way to sign.
@D3F14NC3@lyleberr That’s the exact same vibe I had when I saw it in the Secret Santa thread! It’s super clean and definitely invokes Creatures deck vibes.
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I’m not even a big Elemental Hero fan but when that card came out, it was just something I knew could work.
