A altered art card I made.
I bought some Magic the Gathering cards this week. I bought them partly out of nostalgia and partly out of a desire to make some art out of them.
The nostalgia part has to do with the fact that I used to play the game back in the early 1990s and then again in the early 2000s. So it’s fun to look at the cards and read what they do. The instructions for the particular way to use a MTG card is always written on the front to it. I can read a card and imagine how I could use it in a game.
The other part of the nostalgia for these cards is that they are MTG Spider-Man cards and I used to read Spider-Man. I still read tons of comics every week, and occasionally Spider-Man, but I haven’t been a regular Spider-Man reader since the early 1980s.
It’s only been in recent years that Hasbro (they own MTG) has added cards to the game made from properties that they don’t own. They made some Lord of the Rings cards and some Final Fantasy cards. I didn’t buy any of those but the nostalgia wasn’t as strong with them as with Spider-Man.
At first I just bought a few individual Spider-Man cards off of eBay. I bought four of them and each was about $2.50 a piece. Each was a different version of Spidey. After getting those four I decided I wanted to see if I could get a bunch of cards at once. That’s usually called a “Lot” of cards so that’s what I searched for on eBay.
I’ve purchased lots of penny cards on eBay before. Usually one can get about a thousand MTG penny cards for around $30 shipped and taxed. But this time I was looking for Spider-Man cards specifically so that cuts down on the amount of lots that are out there. Since most of the lots are made up of the cheapest cards there aren’t many rare cards in a lot of a thousand cards.
I looked through a whole bunch of Spider-man MTG lots and most of them were not what I wanted. I wanted cheap and plentiful so most of the cards were out of my price range. They weren’t super expensive just more than I wanted to spend on a whim. The Spider-Man set is a new one so that made sense.
A altered art card I made.
I eventually found a lot that appealed to me. It was around a six hundred card set and had both Spider-Man and Final Fantasy cards in it. Plus some others. The set was around $34 shipped and taxed.
There weren’t a lot of specific cards shown in the listing or photos so I’d be taking a chance. It seemed to be a lot from just a guy getting rid of cards for whatever reason. He didn’t seem like a dealer to me. I checked the town he was selling from and it was a small town in NY State. I decided to give it a go and bough them.
When I got the cards I thought they were pretty cool. There were around twenty rare cards from the Spider-Man set so I’m guessing that they were definitely not from a dealer. Those rare cards were only worth about $2 a piece but add them all together and I thought I got a good deal. Plus there were some rare cards from the other sets in the lot. I was happy with it.
One of the things I’ve been trying to do with these MTG cards over the last few years (since COVID I think) is to figure out how to draw on them. They’ve got a thick coated surface so they’re not easy to draw on. Certainly pencil doesn’t work on such a surface so it’s tough to do any kind of preliminary drawings on them.
Over the years I’ve tested all sorts of markers on them and so far I find the ones that work the best are either the Sharpie extra fine markers or acrylic paint pens in general. No specific brand of paint pen. They all seem to cover the card pretty well. I’ve made various drawings on MTG cards over the years but I’ve never been thrilled by any of them.
I’ve also tried priming the surface of the card with various paints over the years but I haven’t really liked how any of them came out. Just this week I found something that I’ve liked best so far and that’s to use a wide white acrylic paint pen. I have a 15mm tip one and that only takes three strokes to cover the art area.
So far I like the coverage the paint pen gives me and I can draw on it with a variety of black markers. The problem comes with adding color. I can’t use any of the alcohol or water based color marker I have because they smear the black line. That doesn’t happen on regular paper but over that white paint pen it sure does.
I’m going to have to use color paint pens if I want some color but they are opaque. So they’ll cover up the black marker line and I’ll have to redo it after I add the color. That’s an extra step and it makes me have to be slow when using the paint pens to fill in color.
I also have no idea what I actually want to draw on these MTG cards. I’ve been thinking about somehow using stencils to make the drawing easier for me. I have no idea how to do that yet so I’ll have to see if it’s ever more than a notion.
I’m also thinking about mixing my Tiny Drawings with these MTG cards. I could draw just a face and a word ballon with a few words in it. I’m not sure if I’d even use color in this case but I think I will be able to pull this one off.
I could also paste things onto the card. I’ve done that before (also during COVID I think) when I pasted comic book panels onto some cards. That was fun but ultimately a little pointless. After doing a lot of them I never went back to it. I think it was more of a craft than an art.
I don’t know why I insist on trying to draw on Magic the Gathering cards. Regular pieces of paper are so much easier to draw on. I guess I need a new challenge every now and again. We’ll see how this one works out.