This DVD is a recent project from Superhandz, covering the basics of XCM (Xtreme Card Manipulation). It was a huge project, with many card experts involved, and I am honored to have done the cover artwork for it. For this DVD, my client wanted me to have a simple XB in the center with a ring of fire for the cover, all in a black background. We were both glad I ended up doing a bit more than that.

	Xtreme Beginnerz DVD

One of the most challenging parts of this project was probably designing the ring of fire. Previously, I have made all different kinds of fire effects for Superhandz, but all of them were surrounding an object/text, with the fire pointing in one direction (or radiating towards the outer side). Unfortunately, for the ring of fire, there was no solid object that I could "burn"; the whole ring needed to be on fire. The inner side of the ring also needed to have flames burning randomly. To draw the fire manually, pulling the flames in each direction had proven to be tedious and not satisfying, so I ended up with a new idea. I used the same methods for common explosion/ray of light effects that I used for the outer fire. But when it came the time to use the Polar Coordinates filter, I flipped the image vertically, so that the fire would be bursting inwards instead of outwards. This allowed me to keep the consistency in color and visual look that I used for the outer part of the ring. Then it was just a matter of blending the two together.

For the fire clouds, I also had to use two different methods. The first one for the background of the entire cover is the common Render Clouds with some Levels adjustment and color tweaking. For the clouds in the center of the ring, I used the Spherize filter to give it a more 3D look. Blending all the different fire effects together was another challenge I had to overcome in this project.

The back cover's main challenge was the arrangement of the screen shots. Initially, I thought that 10 screen shots were enough, but my client wanted somewhere around 40+ screen shots in the back. But we also needed a lot of text in the back cover, so we compromised and ended up with around 30 pictures, plus one third of the original text. The goal was to show how big this DVD was in terms of content, without making the back cover painful to look at. I think we accomplished that.

This project was certainly fun to work on, and a great learning experience. You can find out more about this DVD here.

All graphics above are copyright 2004 Superhandz.