With the random stuff I work on, usually it feels like it goes on forever. But sometimes, there’s a fine line between done and not-done.

This here Scopa King is done. This is the look I wanted. Nothing more, nothing less.

The last thing I did was add that radial gradient behind the character, and that finished off the illustration for me. I could repeatedly hit undo/redo in Photoshop to toggle between states and go yeah, this current version is done. This version one step back in the undo history is not done. It’s a really fine line sometimes.

I guess it’s all about setting expectations that are both precise and reasonable, which I tried hard to do here. This took a little longer than I wanted, but it was never my intent to make my best illustration ever — just to do something with a reasonable level of quality, in a reasonable amount of time. And mostly, I think I got that.

Of course, the big question now is, how long will it take me to do the other cards? There are 11 more to do, plus some simpler, more abstract numeric cards that will largely be copy/paste jobs.

Getting to this point took around 3 or 4 hours, but I’m hoping for 15-30 minutes per new face card. Luckily, I’ve got things set up in Photoshop in such a way that I can just import my Illustrator art and all the weathering will happen completely automatically.

So hopefully, I’ll have an update on that later this week.