Hello again! Mod Rococo here.
The sales campaign for Garden of Insight tarot is winding down now (as of writing this, it ends in about 12 hours!). You guys have been so kind and enthusiastic about this project, and that means the world to us! We're a small team of artists and writers with a variety of skillsets, and this was... a really big job for us! With more than a few hiccups behind the scenes. We want to thank you again for all of your support -- so, with permission from Dovenart, I got permission to post a little story to commemorate the close of the campaign. Here's a loose, mostly accurate account of the making-of our 15k stretch goal: the altar cloth.

(Crossposted from Rococo's tumblr blog. Buckle in, this is a long one.)

Recently I had a problem.

I agreed to do a design for a Bloodborne fan project. This part doesn’t sound that bad, and mostly it’s not. It’s really cool! I love Bloodborne, and I’ve already done several illustrations for the project. I definitely wanted to do it, in an abstract way divorced from logistics like time and problem solving. I needed to do a design for an altar cloth that would complement the rest of the project art… while we had a boatload of other work on our plates, and I was struggling to concept anything.

Ah. Whoops. 

Perhaps agreeing to do the merch design under those circumstances was impolitic, but we carry on. In my own defense: I agreed to it with conditions. @dovenart would do the basic concept and sketch (or composite) the layout, and I would reuse some assets from the text frames and draw in new content as necessary. (Ideally the less, the better). It would definitely match, it would look cool, we could high-five for a job well done and get metaphorical smoothies (due to the unfortunate two day drive between our homes, Dovenart and I cannot actually meet for smoothies with any ease or regularity. This country is too big). Overall I considered this to be a very good deal. Dovenart had to do the hard part, after all.

(“I can’t finish anything right now. If I can sketch it and you finish it, that works,” Dovenart said, apparently believing that he’d got the better end of things. I did not disabuse him of the notion. In general, if you can convince your coworkers that the job you don’t want to do is the easier one, you will have a happy work life. Sometimes I even remember this when it’s useful.) 

So he did a composite sketch using the assets we’d already made for the guidebook. You can see it here, and it’s pretty solid. It’s a gorgeous teal that matches most of the cards, it reuses existing assets in new ways (why fix what isn’t broken? Don’t! Keep using it until it does break. Then cry) and it shouldn’t distract from the cards themselves. It’s a good concept.

I looked at his composite. I thought about the workflow I’d need to convert it into a working, print-quality file. I agreed to it, really quite happily. This was great! He’d done the hard part! I just had to do the moderately fiddly part where I fought the vector lineart into new shapes. Awesome. We are so good at this.

Yeah… and then I did that thing. You know the thing artists do? “Well it’s already mostly done and I have so many other things to do”, and then we put it in a box and don’t think about it until the deadline is there, looming, with teeth. Haha. Whoops. 

So the week of the deadline came. It sat in the room with me, watching, judging (I had a few days before it was properly due, so threats could be made but the teeth would not close on me yet) while I sat down to work on the cloth. Objectively it was not hard work, but I struggled to care about it. I just… couldn’t get myself to focus on it. We’ve all been there, right? It’s probably a complexity disorder or something. I was on track to get it done for the deadline, though, and I told myself that was the important part. Sometimes you have to, to get the work finished.

A few days into this process of committing myself to Work, I was dozing in bed. And then I was struck by a powerful image. This is already pretty weird for me — I have trouble picturing things with any clarity, and a lot of my artwork is an exploratory process for visual ideas. But not that morning. There was an image in my head, shockingly formed, of an altar cloth design based on Gehrman’s boss arena. It was very cool! It captivated me… maybe because I was half-asleep, but shh. The idea got me out of bed that morning, determined to try to do this lineart heavy landscape design… as an artist who struggles with both lineart and backgrounds.

And then I did the thing you really shouldn’t do, as an artist on a group project: I jumped into something that hadn’t been agreed to.

To be clear, this was a risky decision. It wasn’t what we’d discussed. It might not work. I had a deadline.

But… it was really cool and the image wouldn’t leave me, so. I went for it. I made a new layer in the working file and started scribbling. I told myself I could recover from the time lost, if Dovenart sat me down and said “Spade that’s neat but it’s not going to work for this.” It would be well-within his right. I went after the idea with the slightly manic fervor of a player out of blood vials after a boss with low health. It was probably not going to end in my favour but damned if I wouldn’t try.

The result of that scribbling:

This is how Dovenart woke up to several texts from me to the effect of: it’s okay if you have to tell me no and I know we discussed the other but consider that this would be really pretty—

(I start a lot of conversations like this. Not all of them, but definitely more than two or three a year. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps letting me message him. He says it’s because we’re friends, but I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s observing me like a nature documentary.)

FYI the first sketch I sent him looked like hot trash. I wasn’t entirely convinced, as I drew it, that I could make the idea good outside of my head. But the demons were persuasive. I really wanted it to work. So yeah. I made this very rough sketch and thought: … I might be able to pull this off. This is not an encouraging sentiment to present to prospective clients or art mods, “I might be able to”, but it is the sentiment that existed in my heart. 

But not to worry! By the time Dovenart was awake I’d already sent him several other updates, with colour. Feast your eyes here:

I was racing the clock. I needed to make something polished enough to sell this idea — to myself, to Dovenart, to the demons? Probably all of these — without wasting a minute more than necessary, in case it did flop and I was back to finishing the agreed on piece.

(As an interesting aside, past the lineart stage I was doing as much of this as possible with a computer mouse instead of my tablet. I’m not honestly sure why. I was very against scooting my chair down to the tablet section of my workstation.)

The tile stand-in was bothering me a lot, so I took a break from the main file to make a bigger, hopefully seamless tile of the tea-stained papers we used for the guidebook. I figured it would probably help my case if the texture for the piece looked good instead of like I'd composited in a kaleidoscope shot. Again, for some reason, mostly with the mouse? A textured eraser and masks were my friend, but... why did I do this to myself?

The updated texture buoyed my hopes. Yes, this could work.

Also, I'm sure some of you are holding out on the hope that the way I'm writing here is for dramatic effect. And to that I say yes, but:

this really is how I text people. I'm not kidding about what he came online to.

But I was fighting the tile. So, around the time I was achieving this level of delusion, Dovenart responded to my nonsense:

Cue gremlin cheers. Yes! We are getting a good grade in deviating from the plan! I continued spamming him--I mean, sending updates.

Including one with a vectorised frame (based on the ones @whitecatarts did for the meet the contributors graphics, actually. Go check out their art if you haven't, they do phenomenal work. So much pretty filigree!). There's also one nightmarish version of the design with the linear dodge layer mode on that I'm still oddly attached to.

And now that Dovenart had officially signed off on my nonsense, I just needed to get this cleaned up and sent over.

I left it alone for the night -- assured it would be done on time -- so that my eyes could take a break.

The next day I went back for final tweaks. There was a fair bit of back and forth on those regarding how fine was too fine for printing, esp for the moss details and the particle effects, but that isn't nearly as funny as me jumpscaring the headmod with a last minute change so we're going to gloss over it.

What you do need to know is that I sent over what was supposed to be a final image, this:

And then I started muddling around with the colours of the sky in the file, because it was still missing a certain something (Why? It might actually kill me to leave well enough alone: best not risk it)... and I found a blue layer with a small section masked out. 

(Yeah my file set up is a confusing mess. I can't even say it was because I couldn't reach the keyboard like usual. I just live like this. I'm neater when I have to share the file with someone else, but that was not in play here.)

What was I doing with that? So I turned it on and toggled through a few layer modes, settling on hard light...

Oh.

This is, again, not what was discussed. But I really liked the result of it. I'd already pushed my luck a lot this week. Surely I shouldn't...

But... but pretty. So I sent a screenshot of it anyway, as an alt. Giving the head mod options is generally not a bad thing. And I shared the screenshot to some friends, because... because. 

The consensus was that the blue needed to stay. ... so once again I bushwhacked Dovenart with a major, unplanned change, albeit not as major as changing the design completely...

Thankfully he was too tired to chase me with a stick, like I deserved.

Success! Job well done. I sent off the files and do my best not to think about all the project etiquette rules I have tramped all over that week.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. But... I do have to wonder, did we make a mistake not going with the original idea?