[easybox]Dale Lovelace is in the midst of moving him and his lovely wife up to Seattle (not to work for Wizards.) As such he's going to miss this and next week's articles. We're pulling from his archives for content to share. -- Trick[/easybox]

We've heard a lot about altered Magic cards lately. I'm not here today to tell you when you can and can't use them; I'm going to tell you how to alter your own cards. Seriously, you can do it! I altered my first card around 6 months ago, and was extremely surprised at how easy it really is. I realize you most likely don't have any art supplies, so I'm going to show you how to alter cards for less than $10 in supplies. That's right, I said ten dollars.

The first thing you need to do is make a trek to your local Michaels (or other craft) store. You can get almost everything you need either there, or lying around your house. Pick up a pack of paintbrushes, Michaels has a great pack for around $3.50 that has everything you'll need, the Craft Smart Golden Taklon 4 Pc. Variety Set CS-204. This set contains a number 4 shader, a number 3 round, and a 3/0 liner. It also has a number 8 shader, that's the widest brush in the set, just put that aside, as you won't need that one for this project.

If your local Michaels doesn't have that set in stock, no worries, you can just pick up individual brushes, or another set that is similar. Mostly you need a shader somewhere between a number 2 and number 4, and a liner that is very tiny, a 3/0, 5/0 or even the super tiny 10/0 will work. Don't worry if you don't know what a liner and shader are, the brushes are labeled!

Next you need some paint. Michaels has 2 ounce bottles of Craft Smart Acrylic paints for $.50 per bottle. You will want to get all the primary colors, Bright Red, Bright Yellow, and Bright Blue, plus Black, White, Brown and Green. Michaels has plenty of other paints in both tubes and bottles. I've found that for painting on cardboard the difference in the other paints in bottles are negligible, and the paints in tubes are far too thick for working on a canvas this small.

That is all you need from Michaels and we're still well under our $10 budget, so grab a candy bar while you're there :)

The other things you will need you most likely have lying around. You'll need some newspaper, paper towels, two short plastic cups that you don't mind trashing, dish or hand soap, toothpicks and scotch tape, and most importantly a Putrid Leech that you're not real attached to.

First, fold a sheet of newspaper in half, roll up some scotch tape and put it all around the edges on the back of the Putrid Leech, and stick the card in the center of the newspaper. Taping the card not only holds it still while you're painting, it also keeps the card up off the paper so any paint that should go over the edge won't end up on the back of the card. Take another sheet of newspaper and fold it up into somewhere around a 8" square, this is for mixing paints on, so it should be several layers of newspaper thick. Cardboard from a pizza box also works really well for this.

Fill one of your plastic cups with clean clear water. You will be mixing your paints with a lot of water. To avoid adding thickness to the card you will generally be mixing in 50% or more water into your paints.

-The other plastic cup you need to fill with soapy water. Soap water is the best way to clean acrylic paint from your brushes. Before you take a break or change colors wipe excess paint from the bristles of your brush with a paper towel, then swish the brush thoroughly in the soapy water, then wipe with the paper towel again. Before you stop painting with a brush for any period of time do this several times to get all the paint out. Your brush will love you for this! If you ever let paint dry in the brush, and especially if the paint gets up into the ferule, your brush will be forever useless.

When you squeeze paint out of the bottles just give it a little squeeze so the paint will come out one drop at a time. To mix water in the paint I will dip my finger into the cup of clean water, then hold my finger over the drops of paint and allow the water to mix in one drop at a time. Keep this in mind during this primer when I talk about drops of paint and drops of water.

You will start off with a base coat around the card. We want a very thin coat of paint around the entire border. We'll really water the paint down for this coat; if you make it too thick it will really make the thickness of the card change and make the job look bad. You want to use 2 drops of black paint and mix it with 4 drops of water. You'll be using your wide paint brush to paint the border, so stir the mixture up really well with that brush. You want to get a very thin layer of paint all the way around the border, staying outside the borders of the text box and the title box, but you want to paint just inside the borders of the art box, if you don't go a little past the borders on the art box you'll be able to tell when the card is finished. Don't worry too much about staying outside the borders on the text and title boxes, you can clean up any places you went over the lines with a toothpick later. Also don't worry about getting complete coverage right now, you just want to get some paint on the card, the paint may be translucent enough to see through it, but we'll be applying a second coat that will cover.

You want to let that coat get good and dry. If you try to paint over almost dry paint it will "pull" and leave big holes in the coat of paint. It is best when covering large areas like this to let the paint dry very well before painting over it. I like to do a play set at a time so I can leave cards drying while I start on the next card.

Once the card is dry we want to mix up some more black, but more water for the second coat. Do one drop of black paint with 4 drops of water, mix it up well with your wide paintbrush and apply it to the border. We follow the same rules as the first coat, stay outside the lines for the text and title boxes and just across the lines for the art box. This extremely watered down coat should not add much thickness to the paint, but should cover any places that were translucent before.

Now we want to add in the weird sky. Put a drop of yellow and a drop of red next to each other on your mixing paper. Dip your wide brush in the red just a bit, and then mix that in with your drop of yellow. You're not using the whole drop of red, we're saving that for later. Add a drop of water and mix to get an orange color, this will be more orange than the color of the sky just below the title bar, don't worry we'll make it more red later. Paint in the sky up until the points where the vines are under the title bar, imagine those vines come up through the title bar and that will tell you where to stop the orange of the sky. Now add about 5 drops of water to the red you had let over and mix that in with the orange you have left over. The acrylic on your mixing paper will dry fast without adding water to it, so we add this water in to avoid that. Now let your sky dry.

Once the orange sky is dry add 2 more drops of water to your now redder than orange paint mix, it should be good and watery now. Go back over the sky with this redder mixture. The paint should be so watery it just gives a red tint and lets some of that orange come through. This very watery mixture also should not add much thickness to the paint. When you have the sky covered again wash out your wide brush really good as we won't need it again.

Now I'm going to show you how to "cheat." The black you are painting with is nowhere near as glossy as the original card. There are mixtures you can add to your paint to make it glossier, but it would still be difficult to exactly match the glossiness of the original. With your small liner, mix 2 drops of black paint with 4 drops of water. Now paint over the original card everywhere there is black that adjoins the border. It doesn't have to be perfect, just get a little of this really watery mixture up on the original black to blend in with your much flatter border paint. While you are painting black go ahead and paint in the vines at the top and add the "hair" on the big vine on the right.

Now we fill in a lot of detail. Since the detail work doesn't use a large amount of paint in a certain spot, we just want to put one drop each of white, green, yellow, red and black on our mixing paper, then mix one drop of water in with each, using the small liner brush. You want to extend all of the little juts that define the ground in the original art. You want to not only extend those juts but paint all the way over the original so it will all match. Look at the scan below and I'll give you the colors I mixed for each little jut. For mixing small portions like this, just drip the tip of your liner paintbrush into each of the colors you want to mix then rub the paintbrush around a dry part of your mixing paper. Dip you paintbrush into clean water to water it down a little more.

Next use just a paintbrush tip of black with several paintbrush tips of green and water it down with a couple drops of water, then rub your brush on dry paper to dry it out. Use this almost dry brush to give the trees on each side of the leech some shape and continue up the vines. Since we painted black over them earlier they have lost all their texture and this really watered down paint on a nearly dry brush will allow you to put some of that texture back.

Now we have the top of the card looking pretty good. On the bottom half I'm going to add some slime, it looks like the leech is bathing in it, so it's most likely spilling into the bottom of the card. For the text box mix some green and white with water so it will be translucent and paint in some falling slime. For the area outside the text box mix up some green with just a tiny bit of black and some water to draw in more falling slime.

Now break out your toothpick and scrape off any paint you need to clean up inside the title bar and text box, then use a little white paint and sign it. Congratulations, you're an artist!

Once the card is good and dry it will be fine to play sleeved. The paint is a little delicate and can be scraped off, as you saw when you cleaned up with a toothpick. To make the paint much more resilient you can spray on a clear coat of acrylic, which will make the card almost bullet proof. I use Krylon Crystal Clear Gloss Acrylic Spray, which I pick up at Wal Mart in the home painting section, around $4.00 a can. I spray on two very light coats to prevent adding much thickness to the card.

I'm fairly impatient, so I prefer doing a play set of cards at a time so I can move from card to card rather than waiting for one to dry, so of course I was doing a play set as I wrote this article, here is the playset.

And in case you didn't want to paint your own but like them, the play set in the picture is now available on Ebay (Shameless Plug!), you can see what I've got up at http://shop.ebay.com/dalelovelace/m.html

So I hope you enjoyed this primer on card painting. I selected a card that was fairly simple, but showed some of the tricks I know when altering. If you tried this I would love to see your results! Scan your card or take a picture of it and send it to dalelovelace@gmail.com and I'll post it here in a future article. Until next week this is Dale Lovelace telling you there is more than none way to play!