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as I leave plenty of white space as highlighting, as I have improved and found new techniques that style has gradually been replaced by more complex lighting and stronger colours.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.