I'm not inside your head, and that's why it works
When I started doing alters, I said yes to almost everything. The demand was there, the desire to learn too, and I hadn't yet figured out what actually worked for me.
One day, someone asked me to replace a Magic card's character with a woman. Nothing unusual. But with each exchange, the brief got more specific, then more specific again. The details multiplied: the shape of the pupils, a tattoo in a precise spot, the exact angle of the face. I followed the brief and delivered the card.
The response came back: the character looked too old.
I scraped the paint off the face and started over.
The second version wasn't right either. I asked: what feels too old to you? What would make her look younger? There were no words for it. The answer came as an image — they opened a photo of the card in Photoshop and showed me: eyebrows raised here, mouth moved there. But I don't work on a file. I work on a card, with a brush, across a few centimeters of surface, or even a few millimeters for details. What they were showing me wasn't achievable, not because I lacked skill, but because the two tools don't follow the same rules.
I'm not inside your head. Even when I get as close as I can to what you're envisioning, I can't paint an image that only exists there.
What was actually happening
It wasn't a skill problem, it was a dynamic.
At some point in that exchange, I stopped being the artist. I had become someone else's hand, a tool for an image that already existed in their mind, one I couldn't see or reach. Each new request seemed small on its own. But by the end, I looked at what I'd painted and didn't recognize myself in it.
A card I don't recognize as mine doesn't get published. It stays in a drawer. It happened, I was paid, but it doesn't really belong to my work.
That's a cost most people don't see, but it's real.
What changes when it's different
Not long after, a player wrote to me. He said he loved the style of one of my cards and asked whether something in that spirit might be possible for his. No list, no specifications — just a card, a style he'd loved, and a quiet trust.
I interpreted. I added gold leaf because it felt right. He had nothing to correct.
Sythis, Harvest's Hand — Full art © Céline Combes Alters
Another client wrote with pages of references, specific artists, detailed ideas about what he wanted. It was a lot. But at no point did he take the pencil out of my hands. He suggested, he adapted to what I told him was possible, he trusted me to find a way. At the end he told me he appreciated the way I welcomed ideas.
What matters is the space the requests leave, not how many there are.
Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge — Borderless extension with gold leaf details © Céline Combes Alters
The question I ask myself now
The truth is twofold. Painting small faces is hard : proportions are tight, a single line changes an entire expression, and the expectation of likeness leaves little room for interpretation. That part is real.
But it's not the whole truth. Those experiences pulled me away from portraits, and for a long time I gave the technical reason without saying the other one : that I had lost the desire, that something had been worn down.
What I do now is different. Landscapes, imaginary worlds, extensions, that's where I find myself again.
What I've learned to recognize is the moment a commission stops being a collaboration and becomes an execution, when what I'm being asked to assemble piece by piece is no longer my work but someone else's made with my hands. I can feel that moment coming early enough now to stop before it gets there.
What I do best is interpret. Someone gives me a card, a universe, sometimes a few references, and I bring what I see in it, and the result surprises them. That's exactly what I'm after.
