"TRAP CARD"
Added 2024-01-03 11:35:40 +0000 UTC"Enter gently into the innocent and blameless grasp of the fate I have chosen for you. My hands settle around your future, and it becomes part of mine."
For years the "ATTRIBUTE" icons that denote the elemental affinity of a given card in Duel Monsters have struck me as immaculate pieces of graphic design, little time capsules of a specific era of Y2K early CG flavour present in a lot of JP media from the period. That they've survived unchanged to this day is delightful - the icons for the standard "elemental quartet" of Fire, Water, Wind and Earth are one thing, but the more abstract Dark, Light and Divine are another, and then beyond them even, the attributes for "Spell" and "Trap".
There's a precedent in fiction for "magic" or the essence of magical power to be a kind of additional metaphysical component to any reality, a kind of fantastical equivalent to primordial forces like gravity or atomic cohesion that facilitates the functioning of a reality, but "TRAP" is a purely "mechanical" concept - the idea of there being an elemental material that denotes the sensation or the intent to trap, betray, harm an individual is fascinating to me.
Obligated by the format of the existing attribute icons to provide Trap Cards with a kind of "colour scheme" that communicated this, they opted for something similar to the classical "Dark" palette (Deep purple, red, black, hints of blue) but more binary, a kind of DOOM Fireblu esque deep indigo flooding into scarlet. I think it communicates the sensation of being suddenly caught unawares by misfortune quite aptly - tumbling into the depths of sorrowful blue accompanied by flashes of adrenaline crimson. For years i've wanted to use this palette to paint something that felt like a "Trap Element Lifeform", if that makes sense, an entity that exists purely in this abstract metaphysical deposit of raw treachery. In execution, I could have been a bit more inventive, but as the end of my holiday arrived I decided to plump for something i've loved painting more than anything recently - molten skeletal bodies with outsize proportions.
Here's to a wonderful 2024!
