Lightsworn Playmat

After completing the Scrap Heap final trophies, which I will probably talk about later in the week, I had some free time between projects to work on something for myself so decided to finally get around to turning the Lightsworn sketch into a mat.

It has definitely been a long time in the works, January the first 2003 if the date stamp on the original image file is to be believed, which its not of course all it actually indicates is the image was created during my PC's 'I keep forgetting the date and time' phase. Still its a good few years and quite a bit has changed in that time.

After the jump I will discuss just how I went about finally finishing this design.

Persona 3 Nyx Playmat

I'm nothing if not dedicated. Like the Reborn mat I put quite a bit of time into researching this project, luckily I already had played about a third of the game so I had a prettily good idea what I was getting into.

It was a good thing I did too since If I hadn't we would probably be looking at an additional character and totally diffrent personas. While its not alway possible I find playing, reading, or watching the media the mat will be based on is usually the best way of getting a feel for the characters involved, how they move, interact, their personalities, and drives, which in turn helps inform the overall design and layout of the image.

Which in this case is based on another of the spirals I am so fond of with a serious consideration for trying to fit as many characters on the mat as possible while still making sure that Nyx was the main focus and that she loomed over our intrepid heros. These are probably some of the smallest characters I have done and as such have to mostly be made up of blocks of colour, the in-game art style really informed this look and was a big help, and its also one of the reasons why they are facing away faces at this size being little more than dots and lines, not that that stopped me trying to do the really tiny details and checker pattern on the death card. Doing the designs for the personas was also quite interesting as you don't really realise it while your playing but you never really see their backs in the game, which made orpheus and his harp slightly tricky and Isis very much so.

The colours are probably my favourite part of this mat though, from the heavy use of black to the creepy green sky and sickly lime coloured moon, from the tiny gradients in the characters hair to the almost right but a tiny bit suspect lighting (mainly the global illumination could be a tiny bit stronger in places, the dynamic lights are fine). Most of which was possible due to several new tools that I had just acquired, especially in the areas that have turned to out to be particularly bright, something that will turn up again in a number of the later mats.

Still haven't quite finished the game totally though...

Hellsing Playmant

After our detour into something more recent earlier in the week lets head back in time a bit and finally talk about the Hellsing mat.

As mentioned previously this was the project on which I figured out how to get black to actually look black. Which was handy since the anime and manga'a style relies quite heavily on the use of it and it could have looked quite odd with blacks tat looked grey.

This is also one of those images that have been stuck in my head for quite some time just waiting to get out, I'm not sure where the pose came from exactly having watched so many programs over the years, though it may even have been one of the two Hellsing series themselves. 

After completing the initial sketch there was something not quite right, something I knew was wrong instinctively but couldn't put my finger on I put the image aside for some time to work on other projects then when I came back to it the problem hit me immediately, the hands were on the wrong way round, even someone as flexible as Alucard would have found it quite painful. A quick flip during transfer to the mat and things were more anatomically correct.

In direct contact with the hands were the guns, like the Walking Dead mat I spent some time researching weaponry trying to get them to look right. The most interesting thing I discovered during the research lead to the reason that you can see both ejection ports in this image which is because the guns were designed to be held so that the casings flew off away from the user when both are used at the same time (If you were to use two of the same normal handgun for example one of them is going to eject casings across your body). The fact that while the guns have set amounts of ammo they will go infinite from time to time if the animators can't be bothered to animate a reload was also quite amusing.

Ever since my first mat text has been a major element of my mat designs and this mat required quite a lot at quite a small size, the white text on the black gun proved especially tricky. In the end both guns text were added freehand, the entire time hoping not to make a mistake. the text on the sigil on the glove is even smaller which was also somewhat precarious if anything went wrong especially on a white background. As for the logos I quite like both the one for the original series and the ultimate version so they both got added.

Having coloured pretty much everything else I was left with trying to figure out what colour to do the background, that was until I started colouring it yellow without really realising it, apparently my subconscious had been looking at the colour of the glasses (having been one of the first details I coloured) the entire time and figured that they would be reflecting the environment around them. When my conscious brain final caught up it felt kinda silly for a moment then agreed flames were indeed cool and that way the way it should go.

Definitely one of my favourite mats from the use of colour to the overall design as well as the techniques I picked up in the process, the only slight problem being that now I have used this design I will have to come up with something different for the next Hellsing mat, I have a few ideas already but nothing as solid in my mind as this one was, its not often an idea makes it all the way through production this intact.

Good vs Evil Star Wars Playmat

c'est ne pas une lune...

Ah puns within puns, art puns, Star Wars puns and even references to how many moons seem to appear in my mats, still as the first sentence points out its not a moon so clearly its time to look at another Star Wars mat!

Lets start by mentioning that I have gone with a photo of the mat rather than the usual scan this time for two reasons, firstly that it means I can have higher res images on the site so you can see more detail, the jaunty angle somewhat preventing the image from being reused plus just generally looking more professional. Secondly it allows me to talk about some of the special effects scanning tends to hide which I will talk about a bit more later.

This being the third Star Wars mat I have done means I am getting quite used to drawing Mr Vader and stormtroopers the rest of the cast were more tricky especially at such a small size but I let the shading and lighting effects do most of the work and am quite pleased with the results. Darth's outfit especially had to take into account the various light sources in play and I like the effects on his helmet both because of how it turned out and as it is somewhat of a callback to the first Star Wars mat. I think that maybe the small characters could have been a little bigger in hindsight, theres a bit of space in the triangle they inhabit that could have got a bit more use though increasing the size would have started to infringe on the fight scene so its tough to call.

I always like to try and get some sort of narrative into the design of the mats, when you only have one character to work with it tends to be a bit more difficult but thats not really an issue here where we have the main fight scene, the ships preparing for battle in the background, the trooper making an arrest and so on I wont describe them all here its always best to let the viewer create their own storys.

Finally lets talk about special effects, this image will be the first one where they are apparent but a number of the other mats I have already talked about use the this particular effect to some small degree and a number of them that I will talk about in coming weeks use them more heavily and take them further. I discovered due to the interaction between the mat material and the various products I was using to draw on it that I could create a sort of simple holographic/lithographic effect. From certain angles and under certain lighting conditions I could get details to appear and disappear, luckily one of the angles things are most visible is when you are sitting down with the mat in front of you on a table so most of the detail should be visible while your playing (though lights do effect the overall strength of the effect)

Here the effect it used on the stars in the background and to pick out hi-lights on the ships and that thing that isn't a moon but more importantly on the lightsabers to make them really pop. Its also used to a lesser extent on the characters eyes and Lela's gun has a really feint smoke effect, the question being who did she shoot?

An amusing story has us talking about the mat part way through production and realising it should have been lego Star Wars, a dramatically different layout probably, just because of arm length and body shape more than anything else but the moment it was said we all knew it would have been epic, everything should be logo'ised.

Perhaps for Star Wars mat four...

Dark Magician Girl Playmat

Another look through the archives, this time where I find a mat that I didn't think I had any images of as its one of the few I forgot to scan in before handing over the final piece. Which explains the weird angle and why after some slight editing it looks a bit like its being shown on a large TV,  an interesting look if nothing else.

The other interesting story about this mat is that I also lost the original sketch which would have been fine if it had been after finishing the mat but as it was before it meant having to start over, something of a accident prone production process then though the end result probably benefited, giving me a chance, as it was, to improve  details and adjust the pose slightly.

Large areas of white space and a quite basic background denote another mat from my early collection, the major difference here being that the person who wanted it asked for his name on the mat, which if you were wondering explains the blur. The logo as a whole is probably my favourite part, being the sucker for a good logo that i am, combining a simplified version of the Yugioh logo with the silhouette of the dark magician girl and the persons name in a suitably Yugioh like font, the colours used matching those used in the character to pull the two together.

Probably the most tricky part of the character itself was the wink which is also the reason it turned out to be quite useful having to redo the line-work, the original having a tendency to look odd at some angles.

Something I hadn't considered at the time while working on it but that was pointed out to me afterwards was that I could be sure the mat probably wouldn't wander the would much, theres only so many people who are going to want a mat with someone else's name on.

Walking Dead Playmat

Hands, so very many hands...

So yeah, needless to say since this mat I have had a much better grasp on drawing hands, at various angles and holding weapons, which has come in quite helpful since. 

Most noticeably on the Hellsing mat that came directly after this one, where the gloves and guns are one of the primary focuses, and I don't doubt that the mats that came after this would have looked differently without the insights learnt here.

I also seem to have spent quite a lot of time researching weapons since I began this whole endeavour, a theme that runs though my work perhaps, similar to the large number of moons that also appear, or a function of the types of people that request mats? Perhaps its to early to tell. In either case at least now I know how to draw revolvers facing forward, something of a learning experience in and of itself but also something I had always wondered about.   

Design wise here we have a mix of the comic and TV series visuals, and also the highest concentration of realistic looking faces on any of my mats (while there are others that beat it in the overall total of characters those predominately feature anime style simplified art). It turns out faces in this style and at this size are quite tricky on this material, you have to build up the colour slowly so as to avoid it running and in this instance I am also having to deal with the fact that I decide to go super heavy on the shadows for a more graphic comic book style.

Using black in this way isn't something I'm used to, comic style art wasn't something teachers were particularly keen on while I was at school and college as such I didn't want to just go into this mat blind and start blocking things in. Thankfully having a computer and graphics tablet handy allows you to test out ideas beforehand and while I was at it I also did the standard suite of changes based on looking at the image while flipped.

Having finished the mat there was something about the logo that I felt that it still needed, finally deciding that the red was to bright in comparison to the more subdued hues of the survivors clothes and the blue walkers so preceded to add some damage, as if the logo itself has been infected too.

Definitely one of the more technically chalanging designs and one of my favourites, its always nice when pieces stretch your skills and push you forward.

Homunculi FMA Playmat

After finishing up the Hellsing mat, which I will talk about another day lets try and keep the orange to a minimum for a bit shall we, I moved straight onto this one and noticeably this has resulted in a change of approach to how I deal with black. 

Before the Hellsing mat I was always having issues keeping black just that, even the really dark versions tended to dry in such a way as to make them look grey in certain angles. This turned out to be due to a combination effect between the pigment and the material of the mats. During the production of the Hellsing mat which was one I definitely needed to get the blacks right on I finally figured out a way around this problem and that insight quickly became a driving force for the style this mat ended up with.

While I had intended to keep the colours as flat as possible both because I wanted to match the style of the anime and because I just quite like the idea of trying to create a piece of art that is super flat (though on that count i suspect I wouldn't be content unless the image was 1 atom thick, most art materials and canvases are far from flat making any image therefore anything but) However the piece fought this approach at every turn most notably in the form of the rather large light source in fathers right hand and in the end I decided to just go with the flow and see where it ended up using what i had learned on the use of blacks on the previous mat and expanding it to help deal with the heavy amount of lighting this mat required. I am glad I went this route in the end its not where i originally ended to end up but if you already know where your going when you start a piece of art why even bother with the journey, it will always be more perfect in your mind, i would have never have considered lighting the background and the pillars as i did for example without the knowledge gained from the Hellsing mat.

And yes if you have counted there are 8 sins in this image having not actually watched Brotherhood yet I got a tiny bit mixed up with who was who. Still as far as I am concerned two sloths are better than one   and the weight of the image would have been thrown off by removing the version from the original anime, though I'm sure I saw her character design being reused in the remake somewhere while doing research. I almost included the few other homunculi from the first version too but in the end decided they could be represented by the creepy eyes and mouths in the background if thats how you chose to interpret those the other options being they are the true forms or created by the kid.

I think my favourite things about the final peice is just how bored father looks and that greed is likly to get himself beeten up if he isnt careful.

Kung Fu Panda vs Snowman Eater Playmat

Ok so lets try and go a week without orange in vast quantities shall we? Today its orange's best friend Teal! Digital colour grading has a lot to answer for...

I spent quite a bit of time looking at various fighting game user interfaces for ideas for the life bars and backgrounds, settling in the end for something thats a bit of a mix of everything, it also had the affect of reminding me it would be nice if they made a new Bloody Roar game though as thats not really relevant here. What is relevant is that the entire time I was working on this mat I couldn't help thinking about Clay Fighter and how Yugioh cards would look in that style, this thought ended up being a major influence on the design more thought the movement aspect rather than stylistically.

I'm sure the background much come from somewhere, the buildings are all based on research but the overall composition seems to be based on either the kung fu panda movie or the new WOW expansion or possibly from me watching far to much anime and kung fu movies over the years, it had to come in useful somewhere I suppose. The sky initially looked wrong, well it was ok but there was just this feeling of off'ness, after some time studying images of the sky it hit me that the gradient was up the wrong way, what was more of a sunset before ended up being a sunrise and looking better for it.

While I did briefly consider adding attack effects and some sort of contact effect would have been quite cool the vs in the background would have suffered for it (what I had originally planned would have taken up much of the centre of the mat) perhaps if I ever get some sort of semitransparent glow in the dark colour. Instead I ended up bringing some of the sky colours into the foreground image to provide lighting effects and because snow is very reflective it would have looked weird as just a big blob of white.

As I mentioned in the Gravekeeper mat post I have started hiding easter eggs in the designs lately and this is no exception, the the snowman eater isn't the only one of his kind in this image and there are a number of other things too.

This is actually a birthday mat but for a change one where the details were all very well know before hand which makes a nice change, the tighter the design restrictions the easier it is to come up with ideas usually, its also not something I would have ever considered by myself.

I do feel sorry for the snowman though, being dragged into this fight against its will.

Stun City Playmat

We take a look back in time today, once again to one of the earlier mats I worked on, in this case Yugioh Hero's vs Stun creatures.

You can tell its one of my earlier designs because of how much white space is left and, looking back on it now, the alarming lack of proper lighting.

Not to say there isn't shading but colour to white doesn't really seem all that interesting to me now and feels a bit basic. On the other hand I guess the upside is it does make it quite easy to upgrade this mat, it would get much darker but it might be an interesting change. It's something I haven't really mentioned before but in a number of the mats I have done I like to leave some chance for future upgrades, the Inzektor  mat is an obvious one because of the empty cells, same with the Bleach and Kung fu Panda mats though again any additions would have to be darker than the current background colour but it is possible.

Still even if the clouds are a bit jarring, I would probably do them dark now, I still like the overall composition I like that theres so much going on and it feels like an actual fight sequence, it can be quite difficult to get movement to look right sometimes. it does makes me wonder what happens next, does Captain Gold smash into Doom Caliber Knight or does the shield bat him away, Thunder King's clearly having a bad day being punched in the face like that whatever happens though.

I used to draw buildings quite a bit in ye olden days so its quite nice being able to occasionally drop a load of them in the background of one of these mats when the subject is right, I've even got one mat design laying around thats just all city but that will have to wait until I figure out how create something more along the lines of a water colour effect.

As per usual the horse proved problematic at first, my own fault for choosing odd angle for them I suppose, like hands they are something I'm getting better at, luckily unlike hands they don't get asked for as often. 

These older mats always make me wonder where they ended up.

Next week more orange? or perhaps something a bit different?

Gravekeepers Game-Mat

In my last post we looked at a mat from a while ago that had started a trend towards rather vibrant atmospheric effects. Today we look at the second to last mat I have completed, which takes orange to its most extreme leves thus far.

I would like to point out its not really my fault, Necrovalley was already this orange, still I cant say I didn't enjoy colouring it :)

This mat was another one of those which finds itself in the birthday category, a limbo where you need information on what the target likes while maintaing ninja like stealth, luckily while the parents who asked for the mat didn't really know, the owner of our local gaming store (check out the MFM link on the side bar for more info) is pretty good at keeping track of all his customers preferred decks, personalities and names and was able to give me pointers as to what the eventual recipent would like.

Clearly we settled on Gravekeepers, an archetype in Yugioh that has its roots in the dark depths of the games past but with more recent good cards has managed to stay a relatively high level deck for some years. My first decision was not to bother drawing the majority of the original batch of cards, while they have some stylistic similaritys with the later ones few see play and they look a bit dated. This in mind I settled on keeping the character count down to the cards that see the most play and maybe some cameo appearances if there was room.

Somehow I also had to fit Necrovalley itself, a large stone tablet, a sphinx and most challengingly a dragon into the space. It didn't take long for me to decide I should be using the land as a background, the pyramids in the distance would be handy for scale and I could sit the sphinx next to them, a rocky outcrop on the left side was perfect for a character to sit on and I figured commandant looked moody/cool enough to prop up the other side of the image. the rest was just filling in the spaces leaving enough room for as much of the background as possible. 

Then there was the dragon.

Getting the angles right took quite a bit of trial and errot and I still think he;s possibly not foreshortened enough towards the back end, but on the other hand he could have ended up squished up and I really wanted him to cover part of the sun. Ideally it would also cast a shadow into the valley but at the angle and hight he is flying the shadow should be somewhere off the bottom edge of the mat, I could have fudged it but felt there was to much chance it would look 'wrong' and I was saving the huh moments for other characters.

Lighting was very important to me in this image, with the sun so very clearly visible there was no real excuses for odd lighting patterns. this is also why while the cards art features quite a bit of white the characters in this image have had those areas changed to shades of yellow and orange, all the dust in that desert isn't going to give you pure white edge to your clothes, especially when your standing in a narrow rock formation. The last thing to be done on the mat was the light rays something that could have gone horibly wrong and ruined the image but ended up making the while thing work for me, not to mention being something I just would not have been able to do when I started out on this adventure.

While most of the characters maintain their looks from the cards, even if descendant looks like he's trying to call down a lightning bolt, I did take some liberties with spy. There was just so little to work with and I wasn't a fan of her face so I took what strong elements there were and built the rest of the body based on the sitting pose and the style of the other characters. She might even be a he in the original art but I felt it was ambiguous enough to just go with it.

Finally we have all the easter eggs something I seem to be adding more of to mats of late, while I wont spoil them all as the whole point is to keep coming back to the image and finding new things the most obvious is the millennium puzzle the spy is holding. Others inclide a number of animals and a famous sci-fi spaceship.

Tau custom weapons and mounts

Having recently played in an apocalipse game of Warhammer 40K and only having three railguns in a Tau army of just under 3000 points I decided something had to be done. I have plenty of crisis suits but only two Broadsides for backup so considering that all my regular suits were magnetised anyway what if I built some railguns so they could do double duty?

After some searching around the net for ideas I came across a post on Advanced Tau Tactica in which the author had used Cable ties for the beams of the weapons, noting that many of the other ideas involved components I didn't have access to I decided to give it a go.

As you can see from the picture above I have already created two pairs of guns for suits and something somewhat more substantial for my Skyray, the large guns in the background are a pair of twin linked plasma guns also built to be used on the same mounting but lets start with the suit railguns.

Being all out of fusion blasters, and any Tau battlesuit weapons for that matter, I ended up using Space Marine tank Auto Cannons as the rear of the new guns, partly as I had a number which would maintain a visual style but mostly because I liked the look of the ammo feed, though I new in the end it would probably have to be removed so the gun would mount both on the arms and shoulders of the weapons. The size of the host wepons was also useful as it allowed for the ties to sit next to each other leaving a small gap creating that traditional railgun feel. 

After searching with no luck through my bits box for components that would look good as the front end of thee weapons I settled on just using card and carefully wrapping it around the ties, a coating of superglue is then applied to turn the card into something approximating plasticard. The next stage will be to add more metal plates to the 3 guns I haven't finished yet to allow the magnets to attract them, this first one has metal on two sides allowing for both horizontal and vertical positioning as suspected though the feed had to go which was a bit of a shame.

On the tank front, having rescued a rather dilapidated Skyray I took the opportunity to add magnets to where the missile racks would normally attach. the whole turret mount is also removable and can be attached to both this tank and one other that have both had their top hatches removed and replaced by a modified drone that the turret can attach to. The missle racks and railgun have then had metal added, the plasma guns will probably need magnets sunk into them as they are a little heavier.

Of course the best part about magnets is you can swap things about a bit, though admittedly this particular load out may be a little impractical for most combat situations. It also means the Hazard suits  I featured a while ago can use any of these weapons, they would make cool looking Broadsides though the base size is an issue.

Boba Fet Game-Mat

I mentioned last time that a number of mats of late have tended towards the orange and this is where it started. 

After completing the first Star Wars mat I got asked if I could do something similar, except they only wanted Boba Fet on it. Initially I couldn't help thinking three Fets on one mat was a little overkill but with some discussion and a number of sketches we manage to figure out this three panel layout, all I had to do next was figure out what to do with the two side panels 

Ok, so the one on the left is not exactly historically accurate but the cool factor always trumps historical accuracy (it is written by the victors after all) and I guess thats what the expanded universe is for.  I would have quite liked to add more atmospheric effects but theres generally not much cloud cover on this particular desert planet.

We make up for it though on the right side where I get to go to town, well drawing a town. I do like drawing buildings and such like though I may have over done the level of detail, but then I wanted to try and tell a story with Fet overlooking the parked Falcon and its occupants heading into the city proper, even if they are stick figures at that size.

As it was the middle section appeared fully formed as the first piece of the puzzle before I had even thought about the other two images, having spent so much time looking at references for the first mat I could get most of the outline done from memory which was helpful as it meant I could start the design on the spot and the person who wanted the design could supply feedback.

I seem to have had to draw quite a lot of guns lately as well, hands are tricky things but with the amount I have had to draw lately I have definitely been improving, something I will probably talk about when we get to the Walking Dead mat.

Seachrome Coast - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Finally we come to the last card in this altered deck and also one of the last in line to be done, not only that but it involves colour matching both yellow and purple fun times.

As it turned out the purples weren't as odd this time as they have been known to be and with a bit of overlaying the existing art they blend quite well, it did take me some time to settle on the proper placement of the hexagons though; with a mix of scales, perspective, and curved terrain it was definitely an interesting job.

The only thing that bugs be about the finished piece is that an optical effect involving the clouds and the reflection of the moon can sometimes make the right edge not look quite right, like the border linking the top text box to the bottom one is still there even though it isn't.

That said its still one of my favourites and I am glad I left it until last who knows what it would have looked like if I had done it when I stared the project, a fitting end point for a project that involved 38 cards, 2 weeks, and a gradually increasing suspicion that the person who asked to have it done may have set me up - its a lot more work extending an entire deck that you initially think :)

Still thats not going to stop me form doing it again if anyone askes, its a whole diffrent ball game working with a theme on an entire deck as a posed to altering individual cards, and I woulndt want to miss the challenge or adventure along the way.

Zoroark Gamemat

I like orange sky's, just saying.

Perhaps I should back up a bit, so when this request came in it was actually part of a pair, not literally connected (although that may still happen) but two people who wanted Pokemon mats at the same time both featuring Zoroark although from there the details diverged. Anyway I haven't had a chance to do the companion piece yet so this one will have to stand on its own for a while.

Which it does quite nicely, with its bold, bright, rich colours.

If you look back thought the game mat posts you will notice that the quantity of white in the designs has been steadily decreasing, at the beginning with the twilight mat things are quite washed out as I leave plenty of white space as highlighting, as I have improved and found new techniques that style has gradually been replaced by more complex lighting and stronger colours. 

A bunch of new types of inks helped things along as well.

In any case I did go a bit over the top on this one, it probably wasn't necessary to lay down a ground layer then render every blade of grass individually (decreasing in size as they moved back). As for the sky well I did briefly contemplate a blue one but these was just something about that colour choice that bugged me and wouldn't let me do it, then add in that around where I live on a clear sunny evening (on those few occasions when its not damp and overcast)  the sky will  generally be a blaze of pinks and oranges, well they do say write what you know.

Though this is slightly out of sequence, there was a mat produced before this one that started me down the path of orange sky's and you will start to notice that trend over the coming posts. 

As for the characters I really wanted an action shot, Pokemon should be doing stuff. Getting the angle right took some considerable time, the body was always fine, but the number of head designs I went though was quite high. Theres some slight optical trickery involving the back legs but without them he looked as though he was flying and that wouldn't do either.

Lets end today with a making of video of the mat, similar to the Inzector mat I go though the varaios stages that lead from blank mat to finished design.

Trinket Mage - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

These guys are always a lot of fun to paint, you can be quite lose and imply detail with lines and simple shabes of colour not to mention all the fun you can have with the backgrounds. In the case of the four I did for this deck all the towers in the back of the image are different while following the style of quicksilver sea buildings.

Its also another one of those pieces you don't notice the full extent of the detail till you start working on the card the Nurok guy is the main focus but then theres the artefact he's taking apart and its subtle glow that lights the image slightly and the various pieces of equipment he's using.

As you can probably guess I much prefer this guy to the new art which is fine but theres just something about the original thats more interesting.

Tytannial Game-Mat / Design Tutorial

Today I'm going to talk about the latest mat I have completed, and following on from the Starscream mat talk a little more about design.

I went through quite a lengthy sketching process before i finally got to the design I was after, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do in my head but getting the view from above right was quite tricky I wasnt even sure the arms were in the right place until I had finished it.

For a long time I also resisted the urge to fine line it, the reds and greens were doing a very good job of marking the edges and there was very minimal use of black on the whole mat (this image for example was scanned before I added the line-work). After leaving it for a week though I finally decided to go ahead and add in the black detail and I am glad I did as it really makes the characters pop (the yellow background helps) and look a bit more traditional anime as well.

So last time we looked at the initial stages, today we start at a point just before we start working directly on the mat

About here in fact (Ignore the creases they are from folding it for easy transport). So lets start on the mat propper then. 

No wait there is something important we are forgetting, cant quite remember what it was...

...oh right, yeah thats going to be a problem.

See as most people tend towards left or right handedness they tend to draw with a slight bias one way or the other as well and the brain tends to ignore it since its usually pretty good at filling in gaps and making stuff up, especially faces. Its only when you flip an image over that your brain goes wait no somethings not quite right here that you realise the image you have spent all that time on only looks ok one way around, which is fine but since other people are likely to look at your work and they wont have the same mental picture you do you want to make sure they don't look at it and go, 'theres something not quite right here'.

In the case of this image as I am right handed the left side tends to be more accurate than the right, you can see on the flipped image that the side of Tytannial's face in the box isn't a mirror of the other side. so now we know that we can either modify it digitally to match or even just go back into the original and tidy things up. Once thats done you flip it back and hope it looks right that way around still, if not you alter it a bit more and continue that way until it looks ok both ways.

You can also see I have changed Effect veiler's pose as there were far to many different perspectives at work.

Thats about tit for now but the moral of the story is always check you drawings mirrored before moving onto the next stage, it could save you from have problems later in the process.

Etched Champion - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Theres not a lot to say about this card, the background is all clouds which is fine I like drawing clouds but when all your tasked to do is extend art it means that the piece ends up quite sparse.

Not sure what I would do with free reign to to anything, possibly something to do with the suns as thats the etched guys whole gig maybe something stylised.

Starscream Game-Mat / Design Tutorial

Today we are going to look at one of my recent pieces, the coronation Starscream mat, and more specifically how i go about the initial designing of things. (things being the technical term for all the arty pictures and logos and stuff as well as things like game design which we wont go into here because thats not the target audience).

The first thing your going to need is either an idea or someone with one who wants that thought brought into a more physical plane of existence. In this case we have someone who would quite like Generation one Starscream decked out in his coronation gear on a mat. 

Next up we need to spend some time doing research and getting some references together, sure you could just move onto the next step but this bit is very important, Leonardo da Vinci didn't pull image of human and animal anatomy out of his head he spent quite a bit of time studying the subjects he was interested in. The same applies here, do good research and get a better idea of your subject, in this case research meant watching clips of the 1986 animated movie which by research standards is a quite fun thing to do. I do also have a masterpiece Starsream round here somewhere which could have been helpful but I would prefer not to take it out of the box (ah the wonders of die-cast).

So you have your idea and your reference material what now?

Take a piece of A4 paper divide it up into about 9 sections and start scribbling, at this point the smaller the designs the better as it gives you a clearer idea of what works and what doesn't, its interesting to note I favour the left of the page in most of these designs even at this stage, subconsciously I know that he's going to look better weighing that side of the image down. turn the paper over and keep drawing start on a clean pice and do the same until you pin down the general poses you like the most and then we move on.

This is a slight cheat as I have combined pages but in this next phase you take a sheet of A4 and divide it into 4 then take the ideas you like most from the last section and make them bigger. You can see at this point there are only really two poses I'm considering and the main issue I am trying to resolve is the placement and angle of the arm on the right (for-shortening is always there just waiting to catch you out)

After this its up the the individual I tend to go up to the 1:1 scale, you sort out the background and all the little details and finalise the design, in this case there is still something missing though. So we know all the weight of the art is on the left and while we have congratulated ourselves for using the cape to draw the eye around the image and up to the main focus theres still something missing, didn't the person who wanted it say something about text? Well not specifically in regard to this design but we were paying attention and theres still some space to fill so some text and maybe a logo might look nice and fill the right side of the page in one fell swoop. Now what would Starsream say? Back to the research! 

So we watched the coronation scene again and that combined with having watched everything transformers ever (though we weren't fans of japanese headmasers, in either language) leads us to believe the text in the final image at the top of this page is in character and you could probably make it up of things he really did say relying on the fact that people tend to remember things wrong to make them seem cooler anyway (just ask Kirk, Bones, or Scotty) 

And finaly we add the Decepticon logo, we have the final image on the computer at this point so we can mess around with placement and decide that it looks better on the right.

From here its all we have to do is get the design on the mat and colour it....

Yeah thats a tutorial for another time, or you could check out one of my making of videos on my Youtube channel!

Youtube Channel

Glint Hawk - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

One of the First cards in the deck I altered and also probably one of my favourites and the simplest to do, all the colours stick quite close together and were easy to mix and there isnt a great deal you can add without distracting from the simplicity of the image.

The elements that do break the borders do work quite well though and something extra and different (at least where unaltered creatures are concerned) for the eye to focus on.

The biggest issue with altering white cards is staying outside the borders of the text boxes since the black outlines come and go as they please (the frames use them as shadows so they are more dominant on the top right). a toothpick can help clean up any small errors but will quickly lose it point and can damage the card if you scratch to hard.

Naruto Game-Mat

I once overheard someone saying that thy thought this mat looked like a proper anime mat, the fact that at least initially one of my pieces can do that to someone is incredibly heartening as pens don't generally replicate something generated digitally very easily especial on fabric.

Probably one of the few mats I have done where i have been comfortable leaving so much white space in a design as generally i like to fill the whole page with colour but the design and the art style really demanded it and it makes a nice change of pace.

Naruto's hand in the bottom left was also quite difficult to get right, hands are not easy at the best of times so it took me quite some time to come up with a position that looked right.

So I have done Naruto, Bleach, and Reaborn mats, about the only big Shonen anime I haven't done yet is Dragonball, although I would quite like to do a Buso Renkin mat at some point.

Memnite - Tempered Steel Deck

One of the trickier pieces both because of its colour pallet and the weird scale these cards took some time to get right. I also made things more complicated for myself by making the ground each one is standing on unique since having them all the same seemed a bit dull.

While I think I managed to get the colours right and the ground effects came out quite well the scale is probably always going to be an issue, Ideally i would like to add a big rock or tall grass to the right side of the image but the power and toughness box is in the way. the other idea I quite liked but got shot down was to have various birds looking at them for example a big squadron hawk looming over the Memnite.

Mox Opal - Tempered Steel Deck

I would really have liked to have more time working with the opals, as it was with the task of simply extending the deck there wasn't really a great deal I could add to this card as I didn't want to add more leaves making the image potentially lopsided of pulling focus away from the gem itself.

Given more time i would have designed some sort of new background for the art the arms and gem could stay but I never really got the reason for the leaves, its not like its a lotus.

Signal Pest - Tempered Steel Deck

This was probably one of the most interesting alters from the tempered steel simply because it involved adding new things to the image rather than simply extending existing content.

Getting the yellows right can be slightly tricky as its just behind white for colours with the lowest pigment content and theres always the temptation to lay it on to thick but i think I got there in the end.

Lava Golem Game-Mat

This is the first mat I've done directly without some sort of 1:1 design, sure iI had a small scale sketch but putting pencil to fabric without a guide was briefly concerning. Once you get going though things tend to fall into place as long as you keep things in scale - finding the centre and working from there can help quite a bit.

I'm very aware that the final M can be misinterpreted as a N because of the design, usually I try to make sure my designs have as much comprehension as possible, its why the stormtrooper in the Star Wars mat is white rather than green. In this instance I felt the fact that the letter was melting was worth the increase in error rate plus it can serve as a way of starting a conversation "Team MFN who are they?" "its MFM actually"

I wasn't really keen on the character in the cage of the original image so that got changed up a bit, the original image is also a tad darker but the way the lava was turning out on this version I decided going that dark wasn't really necessary. My favourite parts are probably the metal effect on the text and the lava streams mainly just because of the effects they employ and how they turned out. 

Despite the short deadline I managed to get this mat done in time for it to be used at nationals here in the UK and it went on to feature in a number of the final matches, its always nice getting to see your work out wild in the world.

South West Yugioh Champion 2010 Game-Mat

The winner of the First South West Yugioh Championship mat decided he would like cards from the stun deck he used to take him all the way to victory.

The most tricky part of these mats is the text as it can get quite small in places. My favourite element is probably the King Tiger as the metal effect turned out really well, Its also another mat where I end up using green as the dominant background colour, in this case mainly because it was one of the few colours I hadn't really used elsewhere on the mat and I wanted it to pop.

Twilight Game-Mat

In the second mat I created after the transformers mat you can see I have advanced the difficulty slightly trying to combine multiple elements  into one image. At this point I was still drawing the images separately and then combining them into the final piece and its quite obvious. 

At some point I might have to go back and do a new version using all the skills i have learnt since, maybe if the deck ever gets good again, although the card at the centre probably wont see any play which is a shame. 

I also used different black for this and while filling big areas was easier the drying time was somewhat concerning. This mat eventually went on to find its way around the country, I quite like the idea that they are out there being traded and going off to places you would never expect, shame they don't have any way to post their location back, sounds like something interesting someone could do as a university project, probably need to wait for even smaller wireless chips though.

Araby Ogres

The other day we looked essentially at where my conversions started. Today we see some models that are a lot more recent in the form of a squad of ogre bulls. 

As my ogre army is desert themed they needed appropriate attire, being bulls they only get the most basic of clothing so hats and a few hides or shirts. It's always fun converting these guys up, trying to find new variations on what is a pretty standard hat style, or creating some other peice of clothing. The ogres size allows for much more variation than most other armies troops.

To create the standard hats you take a round flat piece of Greenstuff and place it on top of an ogres head then you make a long roll of Greenstuff and begin to wrap it around and in the case of the guy to the left under their heads. Hide coverings are simply just large flat panels of greenstuff overlaid and curved over each other and then marked as needed.

Though I tend to prefer greystuff to greenstuff it seems to have a more organic texture when dry.   

Quick Conversions - Old School

As a new edition of the game imminently desendes on us I thought I would take a look back at some of the very earlierst conversions I created. These were done around the time of second edition  so therefore are only representative of what a very young me was capable of.

So what do you do when as a kid you start a new hobby and only have the starter set and a tank (in this instance not even one that is part of the same army) and could really do with some heavy weapon guys? 

Well as this picture shows you butcher a pair of clip together marines giving one a heavy flamer and tank from a leman russ and strap a hunter killer missile launcher to the head of the other guy. The chaos marine in the picture got a new arm purely by chance I bought a metal chaos space marine terminator one day and he came with 3 arms which even for chaos seemed a bit odd but hey new arm for someone else!

Dante here lost his axe, which as a chapter master was probably a little embarrassing so as a punishment he also ended up loosing his legs. As a first attempt with grenstuff it was a little undefined but everyone has to start somewhere. How he steers or why he is still wearing his jetpack (that makes it a jetbike right?) are anybody's guess.

2nd ed vortex grenades are still the best weapons in the game though.

infernity Infect Game-Mat

When one person asks if you can do an image for someone else, say for a birthday, it then becomes an amusing game to try and find out what that person would like without tipping them off, as you can see from this mat what that person was into at that time was infect cards from MTG and infernity from Yugioh.

The first job on this mat was posing Glissa as I wasn't really a fan of one of her arts and didn't feel the sitting pose was all that interesting from the other. That done it was time compose the full image and once again I have gone with the trusty spirals, I'm even noticing an even larger vortex now that I look back at it that I didn't see before. The scales of each character really dictated their placement, Blightsteel is huge so unless he wanted to only partially be in the image he was going to have to stand at the back.

The blending on Glissa's armour is also one of the first times I was tempted to be a bit loser with the colours than the typical cel shaded look, I have come quite a long way from there to the mat I have just finished with doesn't use fine-liners, not that theres anything wrong with them but it was something I had been meaning to try for some time, but more on that another time.

Glacial Fortress - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Time for another card from the Tempered Steel Deck and this time its one of the two nonbasic land.

One thing you have to be very aware of when altering other people's art are the dimensions the original piece was created in, additionally there is usually some cropping when the art is added to the card frame which can throw things off slightly too. this is important because if your not careful you can lose the focus of the work. For example there are many very accomplished lightning bolt extensions of the most recent art, the problem is while they add some very nice looking mountains suddenly the image just looks like a basic land with some fancy lightening.

The same thing applies here I could have extended the rocky icy downwards but this image is all about the sheer scale of the monument, your meant to be starting up at this imposing barrier towering above you. That said looking back at it now I would probably add subtle hints of rocky structures a bit further down, dark but another to blend it in a bit more.

Vampire Game-Mat

I think my favourite requests are the ones I would have never thought about, things that go beyond the obvious. Sometimes you go wow why didn't I think of that and others you go, right hows that going to work. When someone gives you a list of the top 20 to 30 cards from their MTG Commander Vampire deck and asks you to put as many as possible on a mat it turns out to be a bit of both.

In the end I decided the best corse of action was just to represent the creatures and physical objects as spells tend to be a bit random in their tone and are more difficult to get the meaning across. From there it was just a matter of trying to squeeze everyone in while maintaining some from of layout, in this case a large triangle that draws yours focus across and down the design then back up again. I could probably have filled the whole mat with images but sometimes less is more and I really wanted to get some form of skyline in partly to tie the three characters with towers in their are into the rest of the image, partly to get bad moon and the black mana symbol in, but mostly because I didn't want the whole thing to be flesh tones and purple.

Working slightly more loosely with the colours on this one with quite a bit of blending going on the peice only really came together for me once I started working on the little details. this mainly involved the artefacts, finding good places to hide them to be discovered later of choosing suitable characters to hold them. My favourite elements are probably the massive impact that vast area of bright yellow has and the tower the nocturnus is standing in. 

Red Dwarf Custom Playmat

Finding reference material for this mat proved quite tricky, between the fact that the design of the ship has changed and the vast majority of the images come from low res stills most likely taken from VHS  just added to the task of trying to get the faces to look right.

Still I'm quite pleased with the end result, theres a lot more detail in the ships than I was anticipating and I like the way the group pose has come together. The background is another case of the person who asked for the design giving me free rein to come up with anything, and while I was initially worried it would look as though the characters were floating I think in the end I gives an interesting backdrop while helping draw your eye around the design.

Quick Conversions - Tau Hazard VF1 head and Magnets

I havent shown many conversions of late so lets rectify that with a look at a simple conversion I did to my Tau Hazard suit that will act as the team leader. 

Firstly we have the head which has had the crest removed and antenna from other Tau models mounted on the sides in an attempt to give it a similar profile to that of the head of one of the Veritechs from Robotech/Macross. a straightforward conversion whos only real issue is that the antenna in question only face one way so if you want the finished result to look more polished you will have to cut and turn one of them around.

The other main element was magnetising the burst cannons, again a relatively straightforward procedure (best to wear a mask when dealing with resin) in this case made more tricky through the lack of a drill bit that matched the size of the magnet. Obviously having gone though this procedure on 2 other suits as well Forgeworld decided that the other weapon options would come fused to the arm elements, sneaky. Still between the magnets and the metal rod pinning the heads in place it did make the suits much easier to paint, and I can always use the weapons on my crisis suits and one of my tanks which are also magnetised.