An example of how the card stages and progression works, in this case for the character Magik.
Another example of how the card stages and progression works, this time featuring Rachel Grey.
This card for the freshly reborn Angel required a new background to eliminate the other panels, and additive drawing of the wings extending where the original cut off.
The character Broo is the focus here, so the mischievous blue Bamfs had to be removed and the objects "behind" them repaired - meaning I had to re-draw the desk, Broo's leg, and fill in the magic explosion.
For this character (Dog Logan) I re-created the top of his hair, and added a more visually interesting background.
The game designers chose to use this holographic-style image of Harry Leland because there was not much other available artwork that was usable. A lot of repair and painting was necessary.
This image of Krakoa, the X-Men's "groundskeeper," required the removal of the Phoenix-powered Colossus to emphasize that this is Krakoa's card and not his.
For Lady Deathstrike's card, they wanted to remove X-23 from the image. It was a tall order but turned out all right.
One of the most work-intensive cards was this one of Rockslide. I had to eliminate all the floating portraits and fill in the resulting missing parts while making sure it looked as though it was all the original drawing.
Rockslide's evolution card needed a lot of work as well. I had to remove or otherwise hide some of the other X-Men members in order to keep the emphasis on Rockslide himself.
For this card for Mimic, the other character that entered the frame had to be removed, the background filled in, and parts of his wing re-drawn.
This Colossus card needed a lot of work. The background has a patterned texture to it that I needed to maintain or else it would stand out like a sore thumb. On top of that there were large portions of Colossus himself that needed drawn in in place of the inset panel. With the deadline coming up for this card, I chose to cover up some of the portions that would've been the hardest to believably re-draw with some more debris scattering from the blow of his hammer.
This image of James Howlett (an alternate universe version of Wolverine) needed a couple other characters removed and filling in of the gaps they left behind.
This card (for a character named Wolverine that has nothing to do with the Wolverine we all know and love) may have been the card with the most work needed, or at least the most complex parts to redo. For a series of in-game events that focused on a storyline from the early-mid 90's, most of the comic art received from Marvel was old enough that the artwork was not layered - meaning I had to manually remove all the speech bubbles, logos, and text, and fix them by hand. Very tedious, time-consuming work, but in general I'm proud of the results!
Another 90's card, for an alternate version of Deadpool called Dead Man Wade. Text box removal and subsequent repairing and re-drawing.
A 90's card for Weapon X, an alternate version of Wolverine. Text box removal and subsequent repairing and re-drawing.
A 90's card of an alternate Dazzler. Marvel required that we remove any imagery of cigarettes/cigars in any of the cards. Luckily Dazzler's powers are such that the spark on her finger wouldn't be out of place, whether she was smoking or not!
The alternate Dazzler's evolution card, with the standard text box/fill in procedure.
A card for Chamber, with a bunch of smaller text boxes and bubbles that needed to be covered seamlessly into the background.
Chamber's evolution card. This is one of the rare cases where text was left in - often times sound effect text like this was too large or covered too much to be worth the time it would take to fix it.
An alternate version of Jean Grey from a cover image, so this card had all the usual cover-dress of title and logos to remove. On top of all that, this one was a little trickier due to her psionic effects on display, too.
Another Weapon X card, this time needing a lot of background work as well as re-creating part of his hand and Magneto's cape.
For the evolution of the previous Weapon X card, I needed to create a lot of fire and flames that seamlessly blended in with the original. I added in some extra debris to save some time and break up the flames a bit. I had to draw in his left shoulder and part of the arm as well.
This card for an evil, alternate universe version of Amazon (with a cameo by her brother Cannonball in the foreground) had some fairly large speech bubbles to cover up with missing parts to draw in.
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X-Men: Battle of the Atom - Card Artwork Editing and Preparation
[Aeria Games / PlayNext] X-Men: Battle of the Atom is a mobile card battle game based on Marvel's X-Men. Each card is based on an X-men character, and artwork of that character is the card's most prominent feature. As such, high-quality imagery of the characters was needed; a mix of both existing art from the comics as well as original art commissioned through external arthouses. My task was to edit and prepare these images for the game, which (depending on the card) could involve quite a lot: cropping the image to create a nice composition within the card frame, shifting the color of the background elements for the various card stages, editing out unwanted/restricted objects or entire characters, and repairing/re-drawing any parts that were affected by such edits. I also optimized and saved out each card's final images for use in-game, and developed a Photoshop script to automate the otherwise tedious save-out process. There are currently 500+ cards, and I've worked on all of them!
