Sketch Gallery

The wonders of modern technology

Please enjoy today’s public post. There’s lots of good stuff beneath the paywall on other days. If you’d like to support my work, a paid subscription is a great way to do it.

Some years back, at an event, someone brought to me 4 foil cards to draw on. They wanted custom Bird 1/1 tokens to use in playing Magic, and asked if I could draw on them. My recollection is he had stripped the front or back off actual Magic cards, leaving the foil layer underneath the ink untouched.

These are hard to draw on, pencil would be near useless. So I opted to draw straight to ink for these, challenging but something I’d gotten used to doing more in recent years through other exercises, particularly with life drawing. The problem was that the foil meant they were nearly impossible to photograph or scan well. As they were delivered at the event, I could only photograph them. They looked like this:

The convention hall lights generated this form of prism-like reflections to my camera’s eye.

I photographed all 4, but felt sad that the drawings, which were fine on their own, would be kind of unreadable. But I pulled them out to see if I could salvage them for Art of the Day and what do you know?

the sketches with the foil removed digitally. Each of these were 2.5x3.5” ink (2017)

I was thrilled to be able to remove that foil and reduce these to black-and-white art, as I don’t know that I would have ever shown them to anyone otherwise.