Amazing job! Congratulations! Your work never fails to impress. Thanks for being the rising tide that raises all, uh, game... ships? (Someone come up with a better board game aphorism here please!)

It's definitely a race.

I am also planning to use PirateShip to get out my remaining copies. USPS Ground Advantage (the replacement for first class) for ~$5 in the US. As for international??? No freaking clue.

And it really scared me seeing a lot of increasingly not obvious AI slop and probably some already undetectable. Please, designers, even if you have to DIY like I did, don't give in to the temptation of selling the soul of your game's art.

So yeah, that's about it. This was a real struggle, but I knew I'd need to art this myself to have a chance of making Wizardologist a viable self-publishing endeavor. It really broke my heart this year going around the big hall at PAXU seeing all the obvious AI slop...

Step 8: You've made an art, and it looks great, no matter how much you might tell yourself otherwise. In the absence of real talent, I've found that keeping things simple and clean can go a long way--hence no face details or hefty backdrops on the Wizardologist cards.

Step 7: Pretend to be a graphic designer. Look at other good game cards. Paint.NET was great for making layers, but you might prefer an actual layout program like Illustrator or Affinity's Designer; I did not use those. Look for royalty-free non-AI assets for backgrounds and icons.

Step 6: Vectorize. This feels like a secret miracle. Take your raster (pixelized) images and run them through something like Inkscape's Trace Bitmap to make smooth vector images you can bend and twist and easily recolor into final shape at any resolution.

Step 5: Used tools and filters to clean up and normalize the doodles. I stabbed my photo editor (I use Affinity Photo) until it made these look better. Median Blur was godly. The GMIC Cutout filter helped refine the shape-y look.

A little practice went a long way for me. I drew the Wizardologist first and never went back to revise him. I did the Disapprenticant last. Not shown: my reference photo of me covered in gray towels.

Step 4: Painted over the figure. Paint.NET is great for this. Free and easy to use. Just take a brush and start coloring over the figure. Add more layers on top. Use photos of real people and objects as references, particularly for lighting, shadows, and fabric folds.

Step 3: Created basic shapes and figures. As a basis for each, I used a combination of figure reference books I have from photography, and I dabbled in some free figure posing software. JustSketchMe and DesignDoll are a couple good ones I tried.

Step 2 was figuring out a basic card layout. I quickly ruled out half-card images (like most MTG cards) because people are tall, and I knew I wanted the art to show full bodies and outfits. I opted for full-size art with translucent text boxes.

Step 1 (through 472) was convincing myself I could make something okay looking. I am not an artist, maybe a doodler at best. Getting into the headspace of "This is a thing other humans have done well, and I am also a human, so I should be able to do it okay" is an ordeal.

I was asked a couple times if I could share some of my process. I'm happy to do so, but it was less a process and more of "let's try this and see if it works." Please take from this what you will, and if you're an artist feeling especially generous, I'll happily take tips for improvement.

Thank you! I'll post here in the next day or two once I figure out logistics for getting copies to everyone who wants them.

I believe I experienced this as well, but I also did not give any publishers free copies.

I need this as a giant poster or something.