Keldio Custom Playmat

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Its funny how things work out, sometimes its not the complicated time eating monster projects that provide the solutions. 

No quite often inspiration comes to you when you least expect it and in I my case, and this instance, it was while I was colouring a Pikachu riding a Keldio.

'Oh' I said to myself, 'yes that would be how that works wouldn't it.' 

I'm not sure why It hadn't occurred to me before, If you read the Batman post I even describe how to do it but for some reason I hadn't twigged consciously how shading things properly actually worked.

Magic probably, 'Oh', indeed

Keldio is an odd shape, for a unicorn I mean. You would think drawing a small horse would be relatively straightforward but that bulbous nose throws the proportions into cartoon-land, theres something almost Simpsons'ish about the design, perhaps its just the colour. The mane is probably my favourite part, I like the shine and the way the various materials built up over the course of colouring the mat to crete the final look, just wind blown enough to help Picachu's ears give the impresion of movement.

The background is rather sparse by comparison which while probably not the way I would have gone does help make them stand out somewhat. I did add some depth by giving each colour designs based on that element, vines flames and water drops respectively and then finished off with a Pokeball motif but the choice of colours, and the layout of the whole design really are pretty much as described by the person who asked me to make it.

Its probably why my brain had time to wrap itself around other matters and come to interesting realiastions.

I still had to come up with a way to fit the characters on the mat and the various poses myself. The fact that the leg, tail, and horn form a triangle in opposition to the one created by the colours is a product of much digital editing and messing about before I moved onto the final piece. 

Computers are handy like that sometimes, you know when they aren't intentionally crashing just at the wrong moment.

So thats two Pokemon mats down and one to go. Tune In some time after Christmas when I once again  end up talking about electric rodents and, for the first time, for some reason about orreries...

That last one is less to do with the final design and more to do with a state of mind that started the process, before anyone starts worrying about Pokemon being shot into space.

Although now I say that...  

Facebook Page

I have recently set up a Facebook page for Altermidgard rather than just using my personal page, If you would prefer to contact me via Facebook rather than using the contact form go to.

https://www.facebook.com/altermidgard

On the Facebook page at the moment you can see the colouring progress and some background on how I went about creating the mat bellow, when I do the blog post about this mat it will mainly focus on the initial sketch stages so Facebook will be the only place to find the stage by stage segment of the design process.

I've also cut the post count per page from 10 down to 4 because I noticed the site was running a bit slow, well I do tend to use quite a few pictures :)

Shiny Metagross Custom Playmat

For some reason everyone seems to be obsessed with Pokemon at the moment, no idea why that would be...

Joking aside this interest in pokemon has also lead to me recently creating a number of mats on this theme and so today I'm going to talk about the adventures of Shiny Metagross.

Our tale starts with a large blank sheet of paper, a rather large collection of reference pictures sourced from the internet of both shiny and not so much Metagross's (Metagrosi?) and a stack of small initial sketches. The large piece of paper is blank because we have realised two very important things the first being that Metagross, shiny or otherwise is constructed out of a set of shapes that seem specifically designed to thwart attempts at dynamic poses, and the second being that we need to somehow make him look dynamic while both making sure he doesn't look like he's about to fall over and at the same time get as much of the body as possible to fit within the dimensions of a playmat.

Much drawing and erasing later and we come to the final large scale sketch, I have also come to the conclusion that Metagross could do with an extra joint on each arm. Which would explain why he's not typically depicted doing things such as running and in general doesn't seem to move much, when you have ball joints at your hips / shoulders and either a ball or hinge joint halfway down each arm / leg, well your not going to be participating in many Olympic events is all I'm saying.

But then when your previous evolutions can levitate maybe walking isn't something you even bother with, and psychic is probably your answer to everything.

Next up the sketch gets a quick pass through your image editor of choice. At this stage we are just trying to make sure the person who has requested the design can see something that makes sense. We could just send them the image of the sketch but by throwing in some quick colour everyone gets a better idea of the 3D space the character occupies.

You can see by the time we get to the finished mat I have taken the ground level out. The main reason being it creates an artificial horizon line at the bottom of the image since I'm planing to have the background "sky" be quite dark and abstract I want to avoid a situation where people get a weird feeling that there should be some sort of landscape there instead, which in turn would have led to things like buildings and trees or rocks or a stadium but with Metagross insistent on taking up as much real-estate as befits his shiny metal self those things will either end up mostly off the page (trees would just be trunks for example) or very small making Metagross look even bigger, like he was some giant alien stomping across the landscape.

Who knows maybe Metagross is in to that sort of thing, mine from Sapphire probably would have enjoyed it, more than battling electric fish at least anyway.

So you have been staring at your image for some time now with Metagross staring back and you like it but there are still one or two little things you want to change. so we flip the image and we find that yes the right back leg doesn't look anything like the left back and its a little to close to the body and the head is also not quite right. which makes it time to start cutting the image up and pasting the individual sections on different layers so we can mess about with their placement. We will also use the liquify tool to nudge sections around to get the shapes we want.

When Metagross is finally looking how we want him we go back to black and white, save the file, and can start on the mat itself.

On the colouring side of things I was trying to make sure there was a definite rocky metallic feel to the piece. I also changed the rocks slightly when I started on the final design since thats was the fist point at which I decided which direction the light was going to come from and in the design the sides of the rocks facing the viewer were a little all over the place. The psychic effects linking the rocks and giving them a sense of motion / direction around the image were the finishing touches to the peice.

And thats how Shiny Metagross went from sketch to sketch to more sketches and finally a finished mat 

Metagross, looking sharp, smashing rocks or any fool who gets in his way, and using psychic to move cause Metagross aint no chump who wastes time or energy walking.

Still not  O.P as an electric fish though...   

...even if Metagross seems to have Mr T's voice

Custom Tokens Anime Cats

While I don't play Yugioh currently I still try and keep up with the general goings on with the game. One of the big things at the moment is that the new banned list brought the number of scapegoats you can play up to max, perhaps I thought people would like goat tokens with a twist?. Combine this idea with the fact I had the materials available to create some i set about creating some myself, in todays post I will look at some of those tokens, talk a little about the thought processes behind the designs, and finish off with a brief look at one of the ways in which you can go about making tokens.

We will skip over the first two sets I created for the moment and move strait on to look at wave 3 because lets face it this is the internet and therefore all about cats. Or in this instance creatures that are at least in part cat, as much as a pair of cabbits/bunnycats, a cat thats a witch and Catbug can be at least.

By this point in the process I have also refined my technique, ironed out many of the problems that I encountered, and ditched the custom template I had spent quite some time on, since theres something to be said for nice clean designs that can be used not just as goats but as tokens in any game. 

I also wanted to try and make sure the tokens express at least a little of each of the series styles in their designs while still trying to maintain some sense of a group. 

A task made slightly more difficult with Ryo ohki since I had drawn the original image some time ago and the Bleach hat isn't exactly cannon. The carrot background helps quite a bit in that regard but it still feels as though it falls slightly outside the style of the other 3, possibly because the others use up more of the cards area.

I suppose the Kyubey token could be considered spoilers? On the other hand everyone should know that that particular bunnycat should not be trusted so perhaps its a public service. For this card I wanted to get a sense of the dual nature of what he's offering and the way the witches dimensions tend to be slightly surreal experiences. At the same time you have to be aware that too much detail can cause things to get muddled at this small size so I countered that by using large blocks and keeping the number of colours to a minimum.

Which leads nicely into the other element that I concentrated much of my focus on which was the selection of colours that I used, this was especially important for the blair token since Soul Eater has a very bold bright contrasting colour pallet. I was slightly sceptical of the colour of the pumpkins at first but with the purple background they really make the whole image pop. The basic shapes took some time to build up but the nice thing is once you have one of something you can always create more of it, there were still quite a number of squares to draw though.

Catbug's background by contrast was somewhat more straightforward to create, mostly since the series is likely created in a vector drawing program similar to the one I was using to create all these images. The variable line width black outline is more of a concession to my own persona taste since the show tends to keep its lines very narrow, if it uses them at all.  

Finally for today I will explain the first method people worked out to create foil tokens, its not really a very efficient method and can also be quite messy which is probably why most people have abandoned it but its probably still interesting to learn how people do it, or did it rather.

The first thing your going to need is a supply of raw materials the most important of which are a load of foil cards from the game of your choice. What set they are from actually makes quite a difference, some older MTG cards for example are easier to use than more modern cards, and Yugioh sets are all over the place with their ink quality and resistance to these methods.

After that you will need a way to remove the ink from the cards, you could use an ink eraser but thats hard work and expensive, your could even use glass paper as long as you were careful. Most people went for something a tad stronger and more effective which was another of this methods problems because the substance in question is acetone which isn't exactly pleasant stuff and should be avoided if possible both in terms of skin contact and the air flow of the environment you use it in. 

Which means at this point I add a disclaimer that I don't advise people use this method and do so at their own risk (Seriously its not worth the effort or cost of materials)

In any case you take a cloth add a dab of acetone and carefully rub off the ink on the cards. Even beyond the problems I have outlined thus far you then have to make sure the card doesn't start to get damaged from too much liquid being absorbed and at the same time find a way to prevent stray acetone from getting on any areas you don't want removed, most notably that reverse side.

You will then be left with cards much like those featured above with which you can do as you please.  From here you will want to spend some time on the computer drawing your tokens in your image program of choice you will then take that image and place enough of them to fill an A4 sheet of paper in another file. or perhaps you could paint directly on the card with some form of paint if you wanted.

Finally you will have to print out the images, cut them out, and stick them on the cards except instead of paper you will have printed the file out on some form of transparent material to allow the foil to show though.

You may also notice that your printer cant print white, needless to say this is another slight issue with this method.

From my tone you may have noticed I'm not a fan, still its important to teach people stuff, in that way there are more minds working on the problem and you get new techniques develop.

Next time I should have an actual playmat to look at so join me again then.

Fullmetal Alchemist Custom Playmat

Its been a bit hectic of late and other projects had taken me away from mats for a bit. So, before I start talking about the more recent mats lets get another of the earlier ones I have yet to talk about out of the way.

You can see what I'm going for here, trying to keep the style similar to that of the animation, the fact that its not as bright as digital animation would be works out quite well since the scene is meant to be more sombre and overcast. I had wanted to get the outline of a city in the background but the fact that they are at the top of a hill and the perspective would have looked weird in the end made me decide against it.

Still if I was doing the mat now I would definitely push the shadows more, possibly even to the extent of having shadows from the trees canopy fall on the characters. I would still probably leave the rain out though, the amount you would need to make it look right would most likely make the design far to busy, although it might have been nice to try and make the characters look slightly damp or have water running down the case or something.

On the subject of the sky there was rather a great deal of grey that went into the production of this design, to the point where having just bought a new set of grey colours I managed to use them almost all up, playmat's are surprisingly large spaces and take a considerable amount of colour to cover. You could use less of course and have white areas showing but then the mat tends to get dirtier faster.

Most of the time I will add black lines around the elements of the image partly because it makes the whole thing pop and partly because the colours don't tend to hold hard lines by themselves. Sometimes this isn't appropriate though and what an image really wants is no outlines or ones in a different colour the final pieces that use this style always seem to me to give off a different atmosphere to the other mats I have done.

Next time, who knows, perhaps I will talk a bit about making custom tokens, everyone on the internet likes cats right?

Hunders Custom Playmat

You can tell this is another 2013 mat, partly due to the artistic style but mostly due to the 'cinematic' bands at the top and bottom: 'Coming to a theatre this fall, when was the last time thunder hurt anyone?'

It definitely caused me some Issues though, at the time the cards weren't even out yet over here and I'm not sure that they had english names either both of which made finding info about them quite tricky.

In the end I looked to the manga for inspiration this had the added benefit of providing a more detailed look at their costumes, personalities and some additional poses something you cant always guarantee being able to have available when working with Yugioh creatures. Having more viewpoints to work from when examining characters is always a plus, especially since there is quite a lot of Yugioh art with some really weird poses or foreshortening that can leave things looking very odd.

Speaking of which, ugh Utopia's card is a pain to work with, dynamic sure but where are his legs? Not to mention the fact his sword blocks half the art. It was again quite lucky that there were other views of him - being the signature creature for a series tends to help in that regard. The shape and position of the horns on his helmet can also cause weird effects, they were one of the elements that it took me the most time to get looking accurate since he seems to be built of quite a number of convex and concave surfaces that at first glance don't tend to make a lot of sense at certain angles. Starliege wasn't quite so bad, his left leg is a bit odd but at least all the major detail is clearly visible on the card, and he has the added benefit of looking like something out of Tekkaman Blade.

Being thunder themed creatures they obviously have electricity effects (should be sound themed really I would have thought) and that gets reflected in the mats background, the angle the photo was taken at also lets you see hints of the white effects on the characters that also have feature lighting style effects, although these shift depending on your viewing angle.

My favourite element though, and something i wasn't even sure would work, is Starliege's sword. Getting it to look transparent was somewhat nerve racking as you slowly build up and mix colour.

Avengers Custom Playmat

Finally I can talk about a mat I created over two months ago, now I just need to remember what I wanted to say about it...

Lets start with the basics; Birthday present so basically top secret, luckily I had a pretty good idea of which characters they preferred which explains this particular lineup. I also knew that doing it in a similar style to the Batman mat was something they would prefer, and now we can have Marvel Vs DC when they play against each other.

On my side I knew I wanted to try something other than a black background and that I wanted to push the design further in other ways too although I wasn't sure what they were yet. With all these things considered and after much research we skip past the initial sketch and go straight into looking at the production  

1. Much like the Batman Mat I have used tape to mask off areas in order to lay the large red area down quickly, also like the batman mat I have to build a stencil to mask off the logo, except this time I have to be much more precise, which is tricky with masking tape especially the tight angles.

I have also started blocking in the general shapes with a pale pink, mostly on the red areas while in figure 2 i do the same with the rest. The advantage here is that if you make a mistake it doesn't matter because the colours will be lost under the finished image anyway.

3. I start shading the red areas since red seems to be the most dominant colour in the image. Ideally you should probably lay down basic block colour for all the elements of the image before starting on the shading but I don't know what the background is going to look like yet and also don't feel like working on certain characters just yet.

In 4 and 5 I move on to the blues since there is also quite a few of them in the image, I skip Wolverine for much the same reason as the previous paragraph, typically if there is an element of the image I'm leaving until later its because I want to give myself more time to think about how to do it, and Wolverine's costume and pose was one of the most time consuming parts of preproduction. I went through half a dozen different poses (remembering that they also had to work in the context of the small space he had to fit in) and several different styles before settling on this final one. 

As we are woking on blue anyway at this point I figure I will also darken the reds while I am at it and add some purple to act as shadows, although I'm still not 100% on where the light source actually is yet.

6. I finally start on darkening and shading Wolverine, I've gone with his costume from the 80's cartoon partly because its one of the more iconic ones but mainly because thats the version I grew up watching so its easiest to remember. Also because it felt he would look a little out of place if everyone else in the image is wearing their costumes and he was just wearing a leather jacket.

Aside from the fact Iron man was always in the middle the final layout came quite late. Thor was initially on the other side and Spiderman wasn't always upside down. Having decided on the final layout of the characters I still had no idea what the background would look like however after working on the mat for a while I did know that i wanted the cells to be more integrated than the other mats. Part of that comes though in the way Hulk is trying to break out of his and Captain America is clearly in front of Scarlet Witch but I also wanted the background to cross the whole image as well. 

7. In the end I decided to just wing it, Spiderman was clearly hanging from something he needs a building behind him, Scarlet Witch may as well share it since she is flying, lets just use the cell wall as a marker and draw parallel lines from that. We also have an image where the center character is at the bottom of a v shape so the other lines can run in that direction and then boom you have yourself your first building.

8. the rest of the background fell into place quite easily after that, many of the buildings are inspired by the skyline from the Avengers movie and I even managed to get Stark Tower and the Baxter building in there. The hardest part was maintaining the perspective, both sides had to work their way down to a vanishing point somewhere behind Iron Man's head. And yes it is another orange sky, but there was no way I was doing a blue one when i had the opportunity to do skyscrapers with orange reflections.

9. Now the background was done and I have a better idea of where the light and shadows are going to be I start working on the areas I have left up to this point. Another thing this mat shares with the batman mat is that many of the characters are a blend of both the movie and comic versions, Iron Man's reactor cover for example was triangular for a while but in the end I decided that I preferred the round one similarly Thor is mostly based on the movie version as is Captain America. That said I'm not all that fussed about exact costume accuracy, the most important thing for me is 'can you look at the image from across the room and tell who these people are?' After that you can get into the minutia of things if your that way inclined.

10. I've skipped ahead a bit because it was mostly finishing touches and colouring the logo but the important thing here is that after walking past the mat while letting it dry a great many times I came to the conclusion it wasn't dark enough. Taking a major risk because my stock of remover was quite low I just went in with a black and started darkening things. A risky move to be sure but it worked out, the image definitely needed to be darker since the light is coming from behind the characters. Really they should be in even more shadow than this but then you just end up with a bunch of black cut outs so you have to take some liberties with physics. 

11. I finish up the hands, start on the magic effects for the two casters and do some line work, I have also toned the black down a bit on Iron Man's armour since I had a gold colour I decided to use that instead. Between this and 12 I add the eyes, do some shading with a bunch of different colours to tie everything in, and add while highlights and Thor's hammer's lighting effects

Finally here is a scan of the mat, It's come up a bit darker than the real thing but between this and the image at the beginning you can get a good idea of how the real thing looks  as well as getting an idea of all the little details like the lightning on the hammer, the magic sparkles, or the fish scale effect on Captain Americas outfit (he's got stubble as well but its more subtle)..

And thats how I assembled the Avengers, well mostly, theres probably another article just about the sketches but we have run long enough for now. I still have a number of other mats to catch up with before we start looking at newer ones again so look out for one of those next week, probably one including other beings that like thunder and lightning. 

  

Kakashi Custom Playmat

Once again it comes back to spirals it seems. I wasn't even aiming to use them in this image, it just formed as I sketched and re-sketched the first version.

Which as it happened was more than just a few times. I knew the pose I was aiming for but just couldn't get the angle of the face quite right, kakashi's mask hindering matters further as it obliterates most of the usual lower facial structure.   I ended up having to bring a large mirror into my workspace and work from live reference, which is probably why his hand is about life-size (although the rest of him is quite heavily foreshortened after that - you have to assume he's an arms length away from you).

I mention spirals a fair bit in these posts so I figured it was about time I talked a little more about them. There are a number of ways you can lay out an image, for example in photography and film especially the rule of thirds is quite useful to know in order to keep your subjects within the frame. Similarly and what I tend to gravitate towards is the use of the golden ratio, a spiral structure that tends to crop up quite a bit in nature, and which humans tend to find ascetically pleasing. 

You will however probably have noticed the image above doesn't quite match the golden ratio exactly but then I did mention that I wasn't really aiming for that layout in particular so its not a bad approximation, especially since the thumb pretty much rests at the center point. The other nice thing about using this method is you can stack many spirals inside one another all at different angles (mainly 90 degree variations) and all different sizes to build up a composition.

Another obvious thing I should probably mention is that the hands have changed between the sketch and the finished mat. The one in the foreground bothered me because the pose was going to be a right pain to make look right. The shading would have been all over the place, drawing the palm and the backs of the fingers in the same image can end up looking weird. The background hand wasn't at quite the right angle anyway, I knew that from messing about with the image digitally, so when it came time to work on the mat I just decided the ball of lightning would look cooler if the whole hand had just been engulfed. Theres still a bit of a hint of it being there, between that an an implied arm I let the viewers brain do the rest.

As for the lettering, the straight lines weren't much of a problem and I found a different type of tape which seems much better than what I had been using, the S on the other hand...

See, the colour I use for the black backgrounds likes having hard edges to work against or else it wont create hard lines and has a tendency to bleed. On the other hand I'm not going to get a curve with the tape I'm using. In the end i had to cut out a template, in two sections because of the size, and tape them down in the center while holding the edges in place, you cant really use any sort of tack on a mat since it would leave residue or interfere with the colours.

Inside the lettering as the background got progressively darker I worried it might have gone too dark. One of the things about the blues I use however is that they have a tendency to overwrite each other, even the lighter ones have enough pigment to draw over black, so if I wasn't happy with something i could always lighten it again. The finishing touch was adding a variety of other colours into the mix a bit like how space is dark but full of colour, you know, to add interest.

Well thats Naruto mat 3, I could probably spend several more paragraphs talking about how I spent a fair bit of time looking at all the different ways his hair gets rendered media, or all the little things I noticed about his jacket but I think thats enough for now. I do quite like using words as the framework of the layout though so I'm sure we will see this style again. 

Next time I finally 'assemble' a post about a mat I haven't been able to talk about for two months.        

Custom Playmat Retrospective Part 3 Mats 35 to 54

If you haven't seen them yet here are parts 1 and 2 
http://altermidgard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/custom-playmat-retrospective-part-1.html
http://altermidgard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/custom-playmat-retrospective-part-2.html

So, so far I have looked at the first 35 mats. from 0 to 34. Today I want to finish the pre 2013 mats off and look at the SWYC mats, EX series, and maybe get though all the 2013 mats as well if we are lucky so lets dive right in.

The one I forgot from last time and should be somewhere in the 20's

Mat 35: Inzektors LINK

Like the Zoroark mat this post features a making of video, also like that mat it turns out videos are quite time consuming to make so you wont be seeing me doing many until I get some sort of overhead camera and permeant workspace. I still have this mat I think the person who asked for it kinda forgot about it, but whatever, I'm sure it will find a home at some point. 

South West Yugioh Champion Series Mats 

Mat 36: SWYC 2010 Stun LINK

The South West Yugioh Champion Series Mats are rather unsurprisingly part of the prizes that are awarded to the winner of the event each year. They are the only mats I do that maintain elements across more than one mat (the text and logo area). This is mostly because I figure if I'm going to be doing hand drawn mats I may as well have each one be as unique as possible.

Mat 37: SWYC 2011 Smash LINK

Interestingly this mat doesn't have a post of of its own, I guess at the time I figured it was pretty self explanatory.  Every year its basically down to me to figure out how to fit whatever design the winner want around the logo and sometimes it can be something of a game of Tetris. Most people who do hand draw mats tend to avoid text, there are very good reasons for that... 

Mat 38: SWYC 2012 Burn LINK

... Primarily its because theres a size threshold that once you go below the colour bleed ends up being larger than the text itself and you have to move over to lines instead. The 2011 mat is the anomaly of the group since its the only one without a bright abstract background. Its also quite obvious from the art style this is one of my more modern mats, I've come a long way in three years.

Mat 39: SWYC 2013 Bump LINK

You know I said may mats are hand drawn and unique? Yeah maybe I pushed things too far, still I'm glad they didn't go with their first idea of having100 Mars bars drawn on a mat, that would have been a tad time consuming. Its also probably the last SWYC mat for a while (no I didn't scare everyone off) since players stopped bothering to attend the other qualifiers if they had qualified already which wasn't reslly the attitude the organiser was looking for. 

EX Series Mats

Mat 40: Mat EX 0001 Lightsworn LINK

EX mats are designs that in some way go above and beyond the rest of the range. It doesn't nesasarly have to be the level of detail although that is most definitely the case in this instance. It can be down to the mat forcing me to use new techniques or learn something new that I feed back into the design if standard mats, or it could just be that i feel like the mat deserves the tag EX. You may have noticed that there is currently only one EX mat which is this one, I have ideas for others but its just finding the right opportunity. The Dragonball Vs Scryed mat should probably be in this club as well since its the mat that served as the experimental platfrom for the way I would be doing the 2013 mats

2013 Series mats

At this point I took the opportunity of a new year to start a new numbering system, mats now get my signature and the year written on their back followed by a 4 digit number starting at 0001. Mainly because the general public probably wouldn't get programmer humour, while i don't think I will do 1000 mats this year one of this things you learn when programming is that its easier to plan ahead than have to go in and mess with properties later because you didn't consider all the possible outcomes, "Program our clocks and date timers to go past the year 2000? why would we do that, it would take up more bits and no one will be using our code by then anyway!" Yeah that worked out well.

Mat 41: Mat 2013-0001: One Piece LINK

I can see why people like One Piece and it has done a lot for the way things are going this year since the panel style has proven popular. That said its not really my thing I think it comes down to the fact that while its only just over halfway finished the author has known the ending since the beginning, don't get me wrong having a strong road map is better than making things up as you go along and hoping you can tie everything up at the end, but if you know the ending why not get it out the way at the beginning and then get on with the important job of telling the story without having to worry about people being disappointed at the end? 

Mat 42: Mat 2013-0002: Muppets LINK

Its not often I have a major accident with the colours, in this instance because it was with black it threatened almost having to start over. Much remover later and things were back to normal but it was tense there for a while. When using this panel style its important to get a good idea of the size of each panel in the small scale sketching phase as it will determine how the character inside will have to be placed and how big they can be.

Mat 43: Mat 2013-0003: Hunders

This mat hasn't had a blog post written about it yet, once these retrospectives are out of the way I can get back to looking at individual mats again, at which point this post will be updated with a link and less generic piece of text.

Mat 44: Mat 2013-0004: Batman LINK

This mat could also probably qualify for an EX tag if it wasn't for the fact the One Piece mat did the panels thing first. Still even without that honour its was one of the most technically challenging and time consuming pieces I have worked on with its portraits of real people and use of lighting. This post is also one of the best places to start if you want to learn more about the way in which I make mats as it has quite a detailed walkthrough.      

Mat 45: Mat 2013-0005: SWYC 2013 Bump LINK

See the SWYC section above for more info. Its funny how these things work out, Having just had to draw realistic people in the Batman mat I get to use the skills I have learnt straight away on another pair of people.

Mat 46: Mat 2013-0006: Raspberyl LINK

All the panels and borders lately have finally got to me and even when I am doing something a bit more standard I cant resist adding something to the edges. I really should get round to playing the Disgaea games at some point, although still have Phantom Brave to finish first. I've been wondering lately how I managed to use up so much red but I'm starting to see where it went.

Mat 47: Mat 2013-0007: ???

Yeah no comment on this one

Mat 48: Mat 2013-0008 ???

Similarly this one also gets some question marks

Mat 49: Mat 2013-0009 Madara Vs Hashirama Naruto Mat 2 LINK

So we finally arrive at mat 50! (remember we started at 0) And its a doozy. The blog post is also quite useful if your interested in finding out how many layers one of my mats has, and on top of all that its only the second mat to feature a third layer of protection, the first being the Ligthsworn mat which served as a test subject. One inch black boarders at the top and bottom of my mats seem to be a theme this season, they certainly add a sense of added style or cinematography to the proceedings anyway. 

Mat 50: Mat 2013-0010: Elite Champion 2013 Brothorhood 

While there may not be any SWYC mats for a bit that doesn't mean event mats are done with and this is the latest, look out for a post about this mat in the near future

 Mat 51: Mat 2013-0011: Muppets Go Yugioh 

Also more on this later

Mat 52: Mat 2013-0012: Keldeo

The latest mat to be completed 

Mat 53: Mat 2013-0013: DMG returns, coming soonMat 54: Mat 2013-0014: Coming soon 

And breath, finally up to date and not only did we reach mat 50 but I didn't even have to include digital mats! I will have to have a think about when the next retrospective should be, covering 50 turns out to be quite time consuming.

Next time we will finally be back to business as usual.

Custom Playmat Retrospective Part 2 Mats 18 to 34

If you haven't had a chance to red part one heres the link  http://altermidgard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/custom-playmat-retrospective-part-1.html

Where was I? Right we had just got to the Vader mat and while I have been numbering them for easy list making they most likely didn't occur in that order. Still arbitrary or not you get the general idea, and probably a sense that it might be best to keep some form of record.

By about mat 12 I had lost track of what the next number should be and it didn't help that digital mats were part of the order it became quite apparent that I was increasingly going to end up miss-numbering mats, it is for example entirely possible there are two 7's. With this in mind today we start by looking at the Missing Numbers Series mats. While I had been hiding them before now mats would only get a signature and it was more likely to be relatively obvious I will therefore be basing this list on the image date created time stamp.

Missing Number Series

Mat 18: Goodwin Lava Golem LINK

This is still the only mat where I have moved straight from a basic small scale sketch into starting on the material directly. Partly because my mats have gotten increasingly complex and partly because drawing all over a blank mat in pencil is not the best idea especially if your colours are quite translucent.

Mat 19: Boba Fet LINK

I wouldn't be surprised if having ran all my mats though some sort of colour checker you told me the most prominent colour had been orange, Blue and purple wouldnt be too far behind either. A large amount this is because these colours last longer and have more pigment than the pale colours but more importunely its probably because I like orange.

Mat 20: All Hail Starscream! LINK

Poor Starsceam, things never quite go his way, its mostly his own fault to be fair but one cant help thinking that not long after this image Galvatron turns up and blasts him into dust. As for the blog post well if your looking for info on the first few stages of my production process this is the first time I switch from just talking about the mat to discussing art tutorials in general.

Mat 21: Tytannial LINK

Letting a mat sit for a while placed in just such a way as you cant possibly ignore it can lead to some interesting decisions. Primarily it lets your brain work on the problem subconsciously while you do other things so when you do come back to it you can get straight on with improving it. In this post I also go over how it can be helpful to check your designs flipped over so you can pick up on any problem areas.

Mat 22: Kung Fu Pander Vs Snowman Eater LINK

A jade sky makes a nice change from the typical orange and this is another one of those images that I would have never have though of myself, my imagination is good but not this random. User Interface design is very important, even if it is a made up one on a static image,  if your users cant use the program then you have wasted rather a lot of time and money. Its also best to assume people with no computer experience will be using it, this is why Nintendo have susch a good track record with the non core audience.

Mats 23: Zoroark LINK 

I made a video! Well ok more of a time-lapse still it was more time consuming than I would have liked which is why you haven't seen many others, maybe if I had a tripod and video camera I would them more often. My obsession with orange sky's also reaches a peek here so unless someone wants a Sky's of Arcadia mat or something I cant see it being beaten...hmmm.

Mat 24: Dark World LINK

Ohh card zones that doesn't happen very often, well ok twice. Already an anamoly this mat takes things one stage further and sticks to using mainly blues and purples also skulls lots of em its almost like its 40K or something. A quite useful project in the long run since it gave me some experience drawing the dragon that I would need later on.

Mat 25: Walking Dead LINK

Between this and the previous mat I have once again run out of black, It turns out to be a recurring issue and the best way to alleviate it isn't exactly cheap. Working on this mat was interesting because this style wasn't really my thing but then you have to leave your comfort zone if you want to improve. You do have to be carful with the black though, its quite difficult to fix errors.  

Mat 26: Gravekeepers LINK

Its not quite as big an orange sky as the Zoroark mat but close. Posing characters can be complicated, its one of the reasons I spent some much time watching Reborn since I wanted to know the personalities and postures, in this instance I had the opportunity to make up the personalities myself. When you have to get across information with a constrained amount of data its no wonder TV shows tend towards archetypes.

Mat 27: Hellsing LINK

Sometimes things just come together, In this instance I had the pose in my head for a very long time and this was really the first chance to use it. Its also one of those mats where I have to pose myself to help get it right, even if I did somehow manage to get the hands the wrong way round initially. Having seen the mat around the white areas could do with a refresh as they have picked up a pink tint from somewhere, it could be because of the high red concentration I guess, but that would require a substantial amount of rubbing.

Mat 28: FMA Homunculi LINK

Or the seven and a half deadly sins. Ok so sight mistake on the research front but to be fair the female Sloth character model is in brotherhood, just not as Sloth, Wiki is not always your friend. On the other hand the image would have been a tad female light without her and its not like she's taking up anyone else's space so I see no reason not to include her. Especially as several of the other homunculi from the original series are hidden in the background.

Mat 29  Moon Princess LINK

My first vanguard mat, well finished one anyway and by this point my mats are also starting to use a second brand of colours, it has a tendency to flow more but thats does mean you ca cover a greater area and should mean I can do water colour effects although I havent tried that yet. I have also started putting my signature on the back of mats by this point, the earlier ones written in gold while these later models use white.

Mat 30: Persona 3 Nyx LINK

This is another one of my all time favourites and also another one on which I spent quite a bit of time on research. Luckily I was over half way though the game when I got asked to do this mat but the extra hours put into the optional dungeon without knowing I needed new game plus first were a bit of a waste. Its also the first one that uses the second set of colours extensively, they tend to be brighter than the other set which explains the neon orange.

Mat 31: Star Wars Good Vs Evil LINK

After doing the characters on the Nyx mat the scale must have stuck with me since I kept the scale for the majority of the people on this mat as well. Only this time I have to actually draw faces since they are facing forwards and as you may have notices most of the time my characters are about twice the size of theses. Lightsaber glow effects stars that appear and disappear as you move past the mat and a somewhat worried looking 3PO are all features of this mat.

Mat 32: Bayonetta LINK

I did go a tad overboard on the line work on this mat, it had been a while since i had done the lines first and with a new liner I may have done to much detail. Conversely the colours are a little weak and nowadays the mat would probably be a lot darker. This mat is also designed to work either way up, mainly since I figured Bayonetta would prefer it that way.

Mat 34: Goku Vs kazuma Scryed Vs DragonBall LINK

Lets finish for today with something completely the opposite to the Bayonetta mat where in this instance its totally about the shapes and colours doing all the work rather than the lines. Also a good place to end since its more like the 2013 mats than those from 2012 what with being the test mat for the first extra layer of protection. Who would win? I think thats one of those questions that may never get answered satisfactory. 

Thats the main 35 pre 2013 mats covered next time I will look at the South West Yugioh Champion Mats and the EX Series.