Through doing 3D alters and posting pictures online, I have been asked a number of times if I would write a tutorial on how to do them. I’ve taken a lot of thought over this, since whilst it is nice to write something showing how to create one of my alters, I also have to be careful since I’m trying to build up a mini-business by taking commissions and doing works for other people. I need to be informative, and yet not give all my secrets away! Hopefully the following article achieves this.

Anyone who has seen my blog before will know that it is a Magic-related blog. Recently however, I acquired some old pokemon cards and for the purposes of this tutorial I am going to focus on how I altered a Dratini card. Its simple design allows me to clearly show each step in the altering process.

To begin with I took 5 copies of the card. If you want even more depth in your alter then use roughly double the number of cards, using every other one as a spacing layer, although personally I’ve come not to like the end result of this method so much.

Next, I took 4 of the cards (all except the back layer) and cut out the art box using a good craft knife. With Dratini this step is simple, since none of the artwork that I want to focus on extends to the border of the frame. If that is the case the cutting of each layer requires a bit more fore-thought, as you can cut around these parts and leave them as part of the card frame. Set aside all the cut-out artwork bits for later.

Once all the frame layers are done, I use a sharpie to edge each one (except for the front layer, as I discovered that sharpies bleed into pokemon cards. For reference, Magic cards are fine). It’s important to edge any bright white lines where cuts have been made, although I have taken to blacking out the coloured box around where the artwork was too; it makes the final framing look much better.

All together, my cards now look like this…

and you can proceed to glue them on-top of one-another as so.

When layering pieces to achieve your 3D effect, contrasting colours on lower layers of the card will often stand out, detracting from the final effect. My Ekans is a good example of what to avoid (see under his mouth?).

Of course this isn’t the end of the world, but there’s a simple little trick that’ll help improve the overall look of the card… paint it! Find a paint whose colour roughly matches the rest of the background. The colour doesn’t have to match perfectly, nor does your painting even have to be that neat! But dulling the contrast can be just enough to stop a contrasting background distracting your eyes from the 3D effect.

With the card frame done, the next step is to focus on Dratini itself. For most cards the above and below steps have to be combined in some way, depending on how the artwork is being built up. But as I mentioned earlier Dratini is isolated from the frame of the card and so can be made separately and inserted afterwards.

From the artworks that you cut out and set aside earlier, cut out all the individual pieces you want to use to make the final 3D Dratini. Hopefully you’ve already decided exactly how you’re going to layer them, but if not then be sure to plan before cutting (a rough sketch can help with this).

Now before going any further, remember to edge each piece! Where white meets your edges, you can usually leave those cuts un-coloured, but remember to edge anywhere else. If you don’t have an array of coloured pens then a simple black can be fine. Here I’ve used a dark blue for the body and grey for the ears/nose.

You can see where I have glued the pieces together and also where I’ve added spacers to help build up the 3D effect once Dratini is stuck into the card frame. You can see one spacer is used where the tail goes behind the body (remember it comes out the other side, so that has to go behind his body too!) and two spacers where the body crosses over itself. This will add depth as the body will coil around and sit at different heights. (The above Ekans is a brilliant example of this being done multiple times).

Finally, simply stick Dratini in the correct place in its frame, et viola!

Side Shot

Thanks for reading, I hope this article has been of some benefit to you If you’re interesting in seeing the rest of my works then please check out my facebook page at www.facebook.com/Edguise88alters
If you want to get in touch, have any questions or even if you’d like me to do a 3D alter for you then please contact me through my page. Or if you don’t have facebook, hopefully you can find me on twitter @EdGuise88.

Having had a bit of a break from altering, I finally managed to find the time to work on a commission for Neil Pritchard, @ScornedNerdvana, who is attempting to put together a fully altered EDH deck. Since the deck needs to be playable, 99 of the cards will be having their art altered. But since the 100th (or 1st, depending on how you see it) card normally doesn’t need to be a part of the main deck, I offered to do his General in 3D!

And so I was sent numerous copies of Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant, including foils and german cards. Now the first thing that stands out is that Sasaya is not a “normal” magic card. Being a flip card, the artwork for each half of the card is effectively half the regular size, and on top of that each half is upside-down relative to the other! Whilst this makes for a brilliant piece of artwork, it also makes it a real pain to imagine the final design when 3D’ing the card. Of course, this is never actually a concern for the original artist so I can hardly lay blame for this on anyone other than myself for taking on the task!

One thing that really stood out is that once the trees were placed in the foreground, the same dark artwork in the background really stood out. Contemplating a solution, I remembered reading one of Andrew Sitte’s articles where he wrote about altering Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. His solution was to use a closely-coloured paint in order to mask the unwanted brightness (or in my case, darkness) further back in the art. Fortunately I happen to have a number of my old Warhammer paints laying around, so I was able to use a blue/grey to paint over the trees in the background. You can see more clearly what I mean in the image below.

As you can see, it doesn’t have to be the greatest painting in the world or even perfectly colour-matched. But it’s just enough to distract the eye away from the darkness that would otherwise draw significant attention.

With that done, the main challenge I had set myself for this piece was to do the green bits of “energy” in foil. And by this, I mean using an actual foil copy of the card, rather than just a blank foil card that can obtained by removing the ink from any foil magic card like the piece I used when altering Boros Charm. My first attempt at cutting out these pieces for this alter looked ok, but I wasn’t happy with it. I quickly learned that cutting foils adds a whole new level of difficulty. Fortunately I had a second foil copy to work with, and using a flash to emphasise the foiling, the final piece looks like this

I was also really pleased that I was able to add a bit more depth to Sasaya herself, adding layers to her arms (legs?) and head. Overall I was really happy with how this card ended up, and more importantly so was Neil! She is now in his hands and ready to take command on the battlefield. As soon as the rest of the card have been altered too, of course.

Furthermore, being my first EDH general alter it has now made me really want to give some of own generals a go. Since Wizards seem reluctant to give me a foil Zedruu the Greathearted, that seems like a great place to begin. Watch this space.

Finally, just a bit of an advert really. I’m UK based, so if anyone is interested in seeing more of my work or even if you might like to own a 3D copy of your General (or any card you like!) then I now have a facebook page. You can find it here, please like and share! Thank you

So yesterday I got round to working on my third attempt at a 3D card alter. This time, I decided to try the hellish mutation of a bunny that is Vizzerdrix! This card’s artwork is relatively simple, yet the layering within provides great potential for altering. Instead of just building the card layer upon layer, here it’s possible to have pieces, such as the branches, flowing between layers.

With the branches flowing behind one-another, I decided to keep the bunny himself simple for this piece. Sitting on the main branch, his right hand (claw?) is reaching back. Glued only by his foot and right hand, this makes his left hand actually reach forward, almost out of the card.

Whilst I could have added more layers to the Vizzerdrix, perhaps separating out legs and arms from the body, this would have required the card itself having a lot more layers. And with these all being needed towards the front of the artwork, would have dis-proportioned the effect of the interlocking branches.

For a third piece I’m really happy with this one. Again, apologies for the poor photo quality Getting a better angle to show off the 3D is awkward whilst keeping the whole thing in focus. For my next piece I’m considering either Porcelain Legionnaire or Ninja of the Deep Hours. Thoughts?

Oh, and whilst I remember, would you be interested in reading more about the actual process itself? Should I be taking Work in Progress pictures and compiling a sort-of step-by-step “how to” guide?

@EdGuise88

A long time ago, I decided that at some point I’d really like to try my hand at card altering. Now, I’m not much of an artist, but I figured that 3D altering might well be within the realms of possibility. Now whilst the thought of giving this a go is fun, the reality of having to cut up cards is actually quite daunting!

Over time, I collected a large number of Whitemane Lions. I really liked the artwork, and I could see how I might be able to layer the artwork for a nice 3D effect. Having collected in excess of 10 Lions, it still took some time for me to sit down and do it. But when I finally gathered the courage to make the first cut, I set to work.

I started by cutting out the art of 3 cards, as well as a couple of basic lands so I had excess card frames to use as spacers allowing me to give more depth to the card. I’d read quite a bit into 3D altering before starting, and the one tip that is emphasised more than anything else is that you should always edge* all the pieces of your card.

(*When you cut a card, the sides of any piece are a very bright white, generally in stark contrast to the card artwork, hence this tends to stand out a lot. “Edging” is simply using a pen to “colour in” the edges of the pieces you have cut out.)

For my first alter though, I decided that I wasn’t going to edge anything. I wanted to see for myself just how it might look were pieces left un-edged. and here is the result!

(Sure, it might not look like much in that photo. It genuinely does look much better in person! Having said that, I am aware that my camera is not excellent, I’m hoping to get better shots in future.)

Overall I was really happy with the result. Due to the colours in the artwork, you can see that in parts, not edging has helped it look better as the light colours blend quite nicely, whereas the white edges definitely stand out on the darker paws. I also learnt that a full cards spacing between each layer is perhaps a bit too much for the 3D effect. This is especially visible on the hind legs.

For my second alter, I wanted to do something that would let me experiment a bit more and investigate the problems I discovered above. A friend suggested that he would love me to try and make a 3D version of Arbor Elf for him. As he had a spare playset, he literally put his cards in my hands!

Cutting up your own cards is daunting enough, but cutting up someone else’s!? … Still, finding myself with a free evening I again set to work. I started by sketching out the card and deciding what piece of artwork i wante in each layer. One of the best things, for me, about Arbor Elf is that the Elf himself is not at the front of the art, but in the middle. With trees behind and in front of him, I hoped I could get a really good-looking finished piece.

This time, I did edge everything. I only had a black sharpie to hand, not ideal because the ink from these pens can bleed into the card fibres quite a lot. But the darkness of the card art helped a lot in this case, and it turned out that the bleeding was really useful for getting into those intricate bits of the artwork (which were difficult enough to cut in the first place!)

Also, i built each layer of the art on top of the previous one, with no need for additional spacing layers. With more layers in the artwork this helped keep the finished piece down to a minimum thickness. Second, it meant that I could cur out each tree completely individually, for example the large tree on the left is just one layer thick, with a significant gap between it and the back of the card. This definitely helped improve the 3D effect, as it actually looks as though the elf is moving behind that tree, rather than walking into it!

Once I got to the final (top) layer, I realised that cutting all the cards out to begin with was a mistake. The final large tree (top right) would look great as part of the top layer of the card, somethign I had not planned for. Rather than finish the card to a sub-standard and always knowing I could’ve done it better, I sacrificed one of my own Elves so I could finish the job the way I wanted to.

Again, not the best photo quality but you can see here just what a difference the edging has made (also you can see the parts I missed.. must be more careful next time!). I was so happy with it that I really wanted to keep the card for myself, but unfortunately (for me) it was promised back to my friend. Fortunately for me. he loved it!

From here, my plan is to work on a few more cards, testing different styles and effects. On top of this, I need to acquire a good range of coloured edging pens. Not everything can be done in black or left white.

In time, I’m hoping to receive pieces to do on commission. The problem is finding the right audience. Other than doing favourite cards and artworks, the playability of these 3D alters pretty much limits their application to EDH generals. I’m planning to do my own generals, and from there hopefully I’ll find others who also want a unique piece for their collection

Thanks for reading! I have plenty more plans for alters in the near-future and no doubt I’ll be writing about them and posting pictures here. Watch this space!

@EdGuise88