World of Warcraft Valentine Cards

   I've been working on my old WoW Crafting Challenge now that Christmas has passed and my sales have become more managable. I've got 3 completed projects, another in progress and a few more in planning.

   Since Valentine's Day is so nearly upon us, I decided I'd return to the challenge with something Valentine's Day related. I decided I'd make some cards. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. I wanted to use digital art as my medium and use my new printer to create them. It took me about 3 weeks to colour these pictures, and I'm not kidding. They don't even look like they could possibly take that long, but they did. Digital art is not a skill I possess, and despite how bad they look for how long they took, I'm still pretty proud of them.

   I made 4 cards - 2 Horde, 2 Alliance. I drew them in pencil first, then I used a fineliner, then scanned them in and tidied them up. Colouring them took forever, partly because GIMP kept crashing. I had gotten half way through the Dwarf (2nd left) and saved, but the program crashed while saving and I lost the majority of my layers. So I cried for a while then resolved to just do it again instead of giving up and scrapping it through frustration. I'm glad I did because she looks great ^^

   Backgrounds have always been my weakness, so I cheated here and took some screenshots from the game, relevant to each of the different races. The Troll (far left) has a shot of the Isle of Giants - a Troll island filled with dinosaurs. The Dwarf has a shot of Thundermar, a Wildhammer Dwarf village. The Night Elf (second from right) has a tree that fades from yellow to purple in the capital city of the Night Elves, Darnassus. The Blood Elf (far right) has a tree that fades from gold to orange from their homeland of Quel'Thalas. I used GIMP to turn them into mosaics and chose a shape to crop them to that was suitable for the overall shape of the images.