Life TCG – The biggest project I have illustrated so far!

When this client came to me, 18 months ago, requesting me to draw 100 animals, I could not imagine how big and exciting this project would be! This is the biggest project I have illustrated so far and I am very proud of it. I’m making this blog post in addition to my portfolio entry, so I can talk a bit more about it.

The client, at first, would like the images to be realistic in watercolor, but I ended up using mixed media – some of them are watercolors, but I used colored pencils, dry pastels, and ink pens a lot. It is important to mention that the partnership I have with Derwent Pencils Brasil took a huge part in this, and thanks to them I had all the colors and supplies I needed to accomplish the job (yes, some colors went down very fast, and were replaced a few times along the way)!

Unfortunately, their awesome Lightfast paper, which was perfect for this, was not launched in Brasil. So I had only 10 sheets of it and then had to find my way through many types of Hahnemühle ones. Not that I do not love Hahnemühle Leonardo for everything, but 60 animals on this was going to be impractical.

Along the way, the project was changed a bit a few times, so in the end, I painted 60 realistic animals and had help from my friend Mayara to create 100 digitally sketched ones. All 60 have a digital version in the second deck, illustrated by May. Sadly, the production stage cut the realistic deck to 53; so I nicely ask you to buy as many ones as possible from this first print run so in the future the client might launch a complete version of it (😂) – and that will include my very favorite, the Narwhal:

I tried to register the painting process as much as possible, but (everything goes wrong in this life) I had a One Drive problem and lost many cuts; I got utterly tired in the last ones and did not record the process – which I regret a lot; and some of them I just forgot to shoot at the beginning or the very end of the painting (congrats to me 😑). A few mistakes that I don’t intend to make again, just for the record.

I’d like to embed here all social media posts from Derwent Brasil and my pages, but it seems we cannot embed Instagram directly anymore. So I’ll leave you with some videos from their YouTube channel; enjoy ✨

And, if you love the idea of the wildlife trading card game, you can back it on Kickstarter – which will launch on November 1st. 20% of all profits will go to charities helping the revival of wild animals. And if you subscribe upfront on the Kickstarter, website and follow their Instagram, you have a chance to receive one of my A5-sized originals + a golden booster with 360 cards. I wouldn’t miss that!

If you have a project like this and would like me to illustrate it, get in touch, and let’s talk about it!

Best,
Emmy