Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Blinded by the light

After a long wait, I finally finished my first all-foil card, the From the Vaults version of Rith, the Awakener. When it comes to 3Ding, foils present a number of difficulties compared to regular cards. Two big ones are:
1) Foils are much harder to cut, so doing fine details is very difficult.
2) When you cut open a foil, you expose not only the inner white (which normally is easy to color away with a pen) but also the plain foil layer (which can't be colored away with a pen). This makes edging tricky; some spots will have shiny dots or lines because of the foil peeking out.
While working on Rith, I discovered another issue. The "memory" of foil cards (their tendency to revert back to their original shape) means that shaping & molding of parts of the card doesn't work as well as with normal cards. I tried to mold the top layer of trees to ripple and bend in multiple directions to give it more depth, but each time it would return to mostly-flat after a couple hours.
Despite the challenges, Rith turned out really well!

1 comment: