MTG Honored Hydra Embalm Token Sock Hydra

Sometimes people ask you how you come up with your ideas. obviously if your doing something based on guidelines that's easy but what about the rest? Well I can't say i have the answers to that, sometimes neurons fire combining various streams of thought and you end up with hydras made out of socks. It seemed to make sense at the time. The light is really what makes this piece for me, there's an almost realism that's just not quite there but is enough to cause you to stop. I think blurring the background helped too. The other ting that this did was inspire a series following the same theme but those can be for another time. 

And at least we finally know what happens to all your lost socks.

MTG Honored Hydra Alter - Snakes in a Drain

A very straightforward extension, it's dark there's not a lot you can change but at the same time you don't want to ruin the atmosphere. You also don't want this guy in your hand, once you have him in the graveyard though what are you going to use to represent Embalm? as luck would have it I've got you covered, check back Friday to see how.    

MTG Drake Haven Alter: Drake Air force

When they wont let you Astral slide in standard This is probably the next best thing so naturally i wanted to have a go at altering it. weirdly the yellows on this one were much easier to match, the pyramids turned out really well. the blue was a little harder but the really difficult part was painting the two new drakes, the one on the left even ended up being turned around as the composition wasnt working. ok now they might fly into each other but it's become one of my favorite alterations. its subtle but at the same time interesting.

And who doesn't want an army of 2/2 Drakes?

MTG Wandering Servant Alter - Day at the beach

A trip to the seaside is just what the doctor ordered. Sun-cream is rather unnecessary however. the beach umbrella is a nod to Resident evil. This wasn't the direction I was going for at first but colour matching sand is a pain so the less of it there is the better. I wonder if he will ever find his way home.

MTG Manglehorn Alter : I'm on a boat

Lets be honest, you wouldn't try to stop her. Although I;m still unsure if I should have given her an Electric Guitar.

MTG Tempt with Discovery Shenron Alter

Something a bit simpler this time around since this is just an art extension. Its worth taking a moment to think about whee we would be standing is this was out view. We would either have to be in a taller tree than the ones in front of us or on the edge of a mountain. Either way that leave the area at the bottom of the image rather dark with just a hint of foliage. It also means we will be looking almost straight on at the clouds and that means we should be able to see the tops of them. I say that but initially I had them extending off the top of the card I knew something was wrong though and luckily realised what it was.

I didn’t want to leave things at that though. So I summoned a dragon. It could be Shenron, perhaps if your more MTG inclined it's Jugen or one of the other Kamigawa dragons. whatever the case it was very tiny details. 

Roadhog Craterhoof behemoth MTG Alter

Trying something a bit different with this one. Once I had a layer of grey primer done in acrylics I decided to paint the actual image using Ink's. It ends up being one of those pieces that work in person but when you present a scanned close up you get to see all the tiny bush strokes and any flaws.

Anyway I really like the way the Ink lets me colour the text boxes, being thinner than typical paint means I don’t have to worry about going around the text as unless I go really dark it will show through.

The downside of the medium is that once you build up a few layers the Ink decides it doesn’t want to mix anymore and will start to clump. If you ant to do any blending do it right on the first few passes is what I'm saying. 

Cardfight Vanguard Custom Playmat. Dimensional Police Blueprint

 You get used to doing things a certain way. Sometimes things come along that force you to stop and look a little differently. Today we rotate 90 degrees to look at my first mat in a portrait aspect. 

Not so Brief.

Super robots are tall. Something of an understatement but accurate. The point is if you just want one on the mat your either going to end up with a lot of free space around it on a typical horizontal mat.

You could always cut the lower half off. make the top the focus and fill the mat with a flashy dynamic pose. No, not what your after?

Let me think about this then. Hmmm. How about doing the mat vertically? Bear with me you want the whole robot on the mat right, well he's pretty rectangular and mats are rectangular so if you turn one of the two 90 degrees both will match up right, you can fill the mat completely.

You want it to look like a blueprint? OK, even better, a skyscraper would be doe this way too right? I don't want something too static though, how about making it an exploded diagram? You know so we can see the inner workings. Yes? Cool.

Mass Production Type.

You want to know something else about Super Robots from card games? They tend to be low on reference material and/or high resolution images. finding reference got so bad I even watched the episode of the cartoon this guy shows up in and there were still parts of the body and more importantly aspects of the transformation mechanism I wold have to make up. It's a good thing I know my transformers.

As for the design itself there was a lot of revision. Getting the angles and perspective right took some time. it's exaggerated further in this image but the main way you make something look tall is to place the viewer close to the bottom of the page looking up. this has the effect of lengthening the legs and shortening the torso, a useful trick for both robots and humans. The bigness is further emphasized by placing a silhouette of a person in the image. as humans we know how big people are instinctively placing one beside the robot helps describe scale. other scale popular scale animals include birds and fish.

If the pose looks familiar I thought it would be cool to have a nod to a previous mat. Place them next to each other and they can have a pointing contest. not that Starcream would be happy about it.

The hardest part of the process though was that blank mats being as they are, blank, meant that in another twist from normal I was going to have to colour everything but the lines. Worse the bulk of the colouring would be limited to a single colour. I was just going to have to go vey carefully, it quite tricky to make something white again..

Near the end I added the boxes of darker blue to push certain areas back giving the image more depth. the leg on the right does stick out a bit but I wanted to make doubly sure. Plus it breaks up the large aeas of the same blue. Text and symbols were added to tie the mat as callbacks to the original card.

And Finally.

Something else I discoved while working on this project? its quite difficult to photograph a mat this way around without losing detail somewhere so apologies for that. It was a fun challenge, working with shape to create line is something I enjoy, the whole vetical thing though? Probably best saved for situations that really need it.

Next time, things stay this way up, but get rather a lot smaller.


Update  

I found the scan I made of the mat so heres a better angle

Great Expectation - Pokemon Praposal

When I get asked to create something, for the most part, I tend to assume its because the person asking has some idea in their head they want realised, a cool concept they can't quite bring to life by themselves perhaps or a thought they need solidifying. This can take you on fun and interesting journeys but once you have taken on the mission you start to realise there are expectations beyond those set out in the brief you must also meet, expectations that come from ingrained cultural trends, expectations people aren’t even aware they have since they are subconscious but if you were to leave them out they would know there was something missing.

Today's story is one of meeting expectations, working digitally, and getting a rhino to sit.

So whats the brief?

Two Pokemon: A Drowzee is proposing to a Rhyhorn. The style should be more like the early anime than the modern designs.

Two clear expectations then. The first a conscious desire to replicate a particular look, 1995 era cartoons in this case. The second the unconscious expectation of what a proposal should look like.

Lets take them in order.

Here's the finalised background. Why have I painted the whole thing rather than only the areas that will be viable? That's not really the right question. It should be. How would they have produced backgrounds back when they still used cells and paint?

Your going to have several layers of clear film. The top most layer is going to have the character on it, you could decided that on the lowest layer where your background will be painting the bits that are under the characters would be a waste of time, I mean no one will ever see them right?. Or you could look at it the other way. Why add back in the areas the character moves away from when you can draw the whole background once.

Well its the same thing with digital. Most drawing programs have layers, if i'm going to get that old fashioned feel I might as well take advantage of them. More importantly it means that if I decide to modify the figures in some way, make them smaller or move them about for example I'm not going to have to keep going back in and fixing the background,

The colour pallet for this piece is a bit of a mix. I've made sure to choose colours that match those the characters would have been originally but the background takes most of its cues from modern digital pallet. Did you know that when the show switched from analog to digital colour the staff were worried the fans wouldn’t accept the change? So worried in fact that they deliberately damaged the image quality with special filters. Over time they reduced the effect so by the time they removed it the audience had acclimatised to the new look. I mention this because while the brief was to create an old school feel the human brain is a fickle thing. They’ve been using the digital colours for over a decade now, colours which would have been chosen based on the paints they originally used. Subconsciously these are the colours you expect to see, the originals are the ones that wont look quite right. For another example go back and watch an early versions of the Simpsons, are those the colours you associate with the show?

Background painted its time to release the Pokemon.

…

Have you ever seen a rhino sit down? I can't say I ever remember having done so either but luckily for me they can because I needed Ryhorn's front legs free.

Have you ever seen someone propose? That's more likely to be a yes but even if you haven’t I bet you can imagine the scene.

What did you imagine? The man down on one knee holding out the ring? The woman with a look of surprise, hands moving subconsciously to protect her face or cover her mouth?

Yeah you and everyone else.

So that's the scene that's expected but how do we do that with one monster who doesn’t really have knees and another that stands on four legs?

We take liberties that's how, the pose is more important than fake creatures anatomy. At least thats what i thought until i started looking up reference material and found rhinos can sit down in a pose that's much like that of a teddy bear.

That frees up the front end now on to Drowzee.

The designs of Pokemon have evolved over the years. Pikachu is the most obvious example starting out pudgy he's slimmed down considerably. Luckily for me Drowzee hasn’t undergone quite as radical a change. He doesn’t really have knees in the original but we can use grass to disguise that we have added some. It's a bit like those images where circles and other shapes obscure parts making your brain fill in the gaps with what it expects to see. More important is to fet the face right he used to have a more pronounced curve in his nose.

I'm painting the characters in a very similar way to  how they would have done back in the day. I create the lines then move on to painting the blocks of colour. It's just I've done the lines in a vector drawing program so they scale to any size without loss of detail and I'm painting with colours that have an undo function if I mess anything up. I could have done the colouring in vectors too but to avoid too crisp and modern a look I decided it was best to stick with old fashioned pixels.

As for the choice of colours for the Mon's. This time I will be pulling from the originals, they aren’t all that different to be honest perhaps a tad warmer, it's more that there used to be more variation between scene and episodes because of noise on the film.

Thats actually the last piece of the puzzle. Once I've got the image finalised I'm going to want to add blur and noise to create that feel. Not too much though we don’t want to lose the detail. The filters that do this have been around almost as long as the drawing programs themselves, its certainly quicker than trying to get the same look using paper (Since, you know we are trying to imitate film)

Putting it all together the last expectation I need to meet is that this image might end up being used elsewhere. What if they want to use it as a wedding invite or on their website? If thats the case the text should really use a fancy curly font. A clean white boarder would also seem appropriate but a square image seems a tad uninspired.

To keep things interesting I go for a non standard edge to the image, making the white background feel more connected to the image by turning it into the silhouette of foreground grass and the edges of the trees This phase is really where working digitally saves time and opens up options. With access to almost limitless numbers of fonts (Don’t go to crazy) theres bound to be one that suits your project. Not only that but you can move them around and resize things until you get everything just right, I don’t envy the designers who used to have to build magazine layouts by hand.

When you think your finished you send it to them and hope you met all the expectations you needed to cover. Digitally, via email or message obviously. If you haven’t, well you have your file still, its easy enough to make changes.

Like I did to this post's introduction. Originally I was going to concentrate on the working digitally side of things. By the end it was obvious it wouldn’t have met that expectation.

Thais all for today.. expect a more analog related post in the future.