Wonderland No More: The Heart of Gold

Another "Item of Wonder" treasure card illustration for "Wonderland No More" ([link]). This was an experiment for me in trying to make something look really shiny; toward that end, I used the "overlay" option for the brush tool a lot in Photoshop for the highlight areas on the cross-guard and pommel. A few of the scribbled lines on the surfaces that break out of the basic gradient represent my attempts at depicting reflections on the surfaces -- e.g., the highlights of the bars of the cross-guard piece reflecting on the heart-shaped piece.

I looked at some pictures of some brass spheres and how other things were reflected in them to get an idea of how I might try to depict the same effect for the metal heart shapes. (I don't have access to anything handy like actual heart-shaped pieces of brass to be certain that the reflections are the least bit realistic, though -- so a lot of wild guessing was involved.)

For my home RPG sessions, I often put together "treasure cards" that I design in Photoshop and InDesign, then print off onto cardstock and cut out, so I have something to hand to the players to represent the "loot" after a battle, etc. On one side of the card, there's a representative illustration; the rest of the card has statistics that the player can copy over onto his character sheet. The idea is that a full-color illustration can make a treasure seem more meaningful (or shiny, at least) as opposed to just being a flat description with some numeric values attached.