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.