Ugin and the Dragonlords Custom Playmat

Welcome back to another episode of attempting to fit large, flying, mythical creatures into a 12 by 24 inch space. Yes today we will be talking dragons (not literally becoming talking dragons – talking about them) as I look at the Ugin and the Dragonlords playmat.

Brief:

Get Ugin and the five Dragons of Tarkir Dragonlords onto a mat (thats clearly a band name which explains why the colour scheme ends up very similar to the Blue Eyes Ultimatemat), the planeswalkers Sorin, Elspeth, and Sarkhan should be riding Ugin.

Initial Thoughts:

Right off the bat there is an issue of scale. If we make the walkers the central focus then theres not much room left for the dragons, conversely with the dragons as the focus the walkers will be end up being quite small. Best to keep this in mind while working on the sketches.

Secondly if the walkers are riding Ugin what does that mean? Do we draw him in a typical dragon flight pose with them on his back? How will that affect his look since he's got more of a humanoid body layout?

Thirdly how the heck am I going to get all these wings on here and not end up obscuring more relevant details?

Sketching:

A great deal of time was spent drawing thumbnail sketches, trying out various layouts then narrowing down the list of options. Quite early on I discard the idea of having all the dragons flying along on some sort of sky background since then everyone ends up tiny to get everything in. Next out goes the idea if the walkers on Ugin's back, I don’t like focus and there are some odd angles. For some reason I get inspiration from those WW2 American recruitment posters Ugin Needs You! So now the walkers are going to have to sit on his shoulders. He only has two and we are trying to avoid the image being too symmetrical so one is slightly further away from us that doesnt leave much space for three large people. Well he's got a hand free theres an empty space in the lower right of the image that could work.

I'm finally getting a better sense of how I want these dragons personality’s to come across. Red / Black wants to be zooming along so lets try and get some sense of speed maybe a swooping motion. We have enough space available to have at least one pair of wings in full view, what do you mean she has two pairs?

Theres no way Blue / Black is going to be exerting much energy if he doesn’t have to, anywhere on the ground is fine.

They are dragons so there should probably be some breath attacks somewhere. Red / Green seems the best choice, fire and all that, also we want bulk and a sense of strength. Theres a large space in the bottom right free which means...

We need to balance out the image so the other bulky dragon has to go in the opposite top corner. Have a breath attack to mirror the other? Perhaps though Red / Blacks wings fill that role. Going to have to work the White / Green dragons pose around Ugin's pointing finger though, perhaps landing? Reminder to look up falconry.

Which leaves Blue / White. Keep it flowing. Inquisitive, what do Planeswalkers taste like?

Final layout.

I'm going for something slightly different this time since the wings and breath attack form a useful box that draws your eye around the image BLACK. I mean there are still going to be spirals in it, duh, but they aren't whats holding the layout together the RED lines show a number of them but there are vortices all over the image.

Ugin needs enough image space to have room for not only his own great bulk but for walkers to hang on. I decide to draw him being released from his cocoon since it means I wont have to draw his legs. One of the weird things about Ugin, and Bolas is that they have been depicted in art at a variety of scales from slightly larger than human to towering monstrosities. If I'm going to fit the Planeswalker's on him then Ugin's going to have to be closer to the later and if thats the case we can making him look bigger by placing our viewer lower in the image, as if we are looking up at him, BLUE. Since Ugin is also the main focus of the image we are going to have him as central as possible.

Hey look the GREEN lines show us everyone more or less fits within the rule of thirds its almost like I planed it that way. We are also trying to keep the dragons away from the page edges, its not entirely been possible since there are arms and wings going everywhere but for the most part their bodies don’t touch the edges.

Walking Through The Air.

I scan the mats into the computer to do most of these blog posts. As you can imagine an A4 scanner isn’t as large as a mat so it involves combining six separate scans into a cohesive whole. It also has the side effect of showing up the mats underlying fabric structure which while interesting in its own right does slightly distract from other details. The trade off of course is that if I just photographed the mats I may not get all the details in the first place. I think in the end it comes down to what your trying to show and for me and this post it apparently means beards and fly away hair.

In the above image we zoom right in to look at the details on the walkers, keep in mind these are really tiny details, in the face boxouts we are looking at areas somewhere in the region of 1cm square so theres not a lot of room. The main goal then is not to try and add as much detail as possible but to draw something that implies what you want it to when viewed at from a more natural distance.

Lets take Sorin's head as an example. It's a blue square with a dark line that may imply cheekbones, a 'L' shape that may be where the edge of the nose is, two dark ovals and a slightly lighter splodge where the eyes are expected, and a thin line that could be construed as a mouth. Its not really a head its a series of marks but because of the way our brains lie to us thats what we interpret it as. As an aside its always amusing to see who Facebook thinks characters you have drawn are, its sort of nice as an artist to know a computer at least thinks these marks on the page are vaguely human shaped.

The box next to that is interesting also since it shows how the fabric doesn’t always scan the same in each section. Putting the whole image together tends to be easier if you scan each section the same way up.

Whilst these areas are very small you can still use light and dark to try and recreate certain effects. If we draw little '>''s in a darker colour on Elspeth's armour it gives the impression of scale mail. On the other hand the little black bump on the side of Sarkhan's hand is probably just a tiny bit more detail than we actually need, its meant to be his thumb but we could probably expressed 'hand'-ness without it. Its all about striking a balance, make sure to move between working close up and looking at you image from a distance.

Finally since they are riding a large once godlike dragon lets mess their hair up a bit to give more of a sense of movement. Elspeth may or may not also be slightly concerned about her armour melting. As she should, we are dealing with 'Ugin and the Dragonlords' they know how to turn it up to 11.

Until next time... I want to make a rock the dragon pun but the Dragonball mat was a few posts ago.

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 1 Mats 0 to 17

I'm closing in on, if not having already passed, my 50th mat and since I have written quite a number of blog posts about them perhaps its a good idea take some time top reflect and look back as well as providing links back to older mats and  posts for people who may have missed them.

If we were to go right back to the beginning everything would begin at what I believe is now called comic con but while that event has many tales associated with it, a transport system's attempts to thwart our progress or a mob of vengeful Yugioh players descending on a hapless Dark Armed Dragon-napper being just two examples, they are stories for other times and places, mat wise we begin here.

MAT - 0: Transformers: LINK

Did I mention I'm part programmer? As such we start things off with mat zero, a mat which I still own. This mat its rolled up and lives with all the mats i've won or acquired over the years so looks essentially the same as the day I finished it and while I still think it needs a companion piece the large areas of while space make me less inclined to create one. I could always add a background of course but somehow thats feels wrong.

Hidden Numbers Series  

Mats one to somewhere around the Star Wars Vader heads mat have my signature hidden along with the date somewhere along the edge of the mat. The main reason I stopped doing this was because it was getting increasingly difficult to hide them in creative ways.

Mat ! (or 2): Twilight: LINK & Mat 2 (or 1) Alien: LINK

These two mats along with the Transformers one are the only three mats that I created from Individual elements recombined at the end of the design process, Turns out I didn't really like working that way and soon after moved to designing them at full scale 1 to 1 and it really shows. The background complexity increases and designs become more holistic you also become more able to use standard layout techniques such as rule of thirds or the golden ratio.

I like to hope the Twilight mat is still out there, somewhere traded from person to person, it may have seen more places and events than I have, which could be a tad depressing i guess, or maby its living a quiet life rolled up somewhere like Mat 0.

Please note that these probably aren't in proper chronological order, they are close but the numbers on the actual mats give the correct sequence.

Mat 3 Dark Magician Girl: LINK

Never was there or has been since a mat with so many problems revolving around getting images of it. The first Design going missing is one thing but only have this one image of the final piece is quite another. Once again we have a member of the minimalist background phase I was in at this point. To be fair this sort of background does still happen occasionally when people don't know what they want or if a design calls for it. I have recently be asked to do another Dark Magician Girl mat so it will be interesting to see how the two compare.

Mat 4 (or possibly 5): Oppression LINK

Ok thats more like it, although thoughts at the time ranged from argh I have to draw a horse to I'm still not sure about the colours. Looking back now its definitely trippy and I guess you could say this is where my tendency towards orange skys starts, theres even teal in it hows that for movie style! Seriously though this thing isn't subtleand I quite like it that way.

Mat 5 ( Blackwings: LINK

How many characters can you get on one mat? We wont find out for a while but this is where it starts getting properly complicated. One of the main features of these early mats is that I am relying quite heavily on the line-work and while the shading is quite good on this one the outlines are very obvious. it could probably do with being a bit darker rin places as well but at the time I didn't have a great range of colours.

Mat 6: Bleach Squad 11: Link

Still a favourite though its seen a lot of use over the years and I wouldn't mind cleaning it and giving the colours a bit of a refresh. Theres definite something to be said for bright geometric backgrounds and primary colours. I am a tiny bit surprised its the only Bleach mat I've been asked to do though, having only watched as far as episode 42 I can only guess people got burnt out of all the filler between this and Naruto at one point in time.

Mat 7: Reborn: LINK 

These days I don't have quite as much time to put into research as when I was working on this mat so don't expect me to watch every episode of One Piece or Gintama! Still definitely an interesting approach to research and its interesting how mats tend to group together in this instance a pair of anime mats. these guys would probably look quite cool done in the style of the One Piece mat.

Mat 8: Stun City: LINK

This is actually probably more like mat 4 or 5 but whatever. The easiest way to avoid issues with scanning mats is not have to many vertical lines or detail that intersects the very center, as you can imagine this one caused problems. Its another mat that I would be fun to go back and add a load of lighting effects on. Have you also noticed my very obvious naming conventions for mats? Its all fine until I ever have to do more from the same series or characters.

Mat 9: Infect Infernity: Link

Its taken some time but we have finally starting to see some proper shading and movement away from the block colours, although this mat may also come before the two anime mats. I don't do MTG mats nearly enough, I keep meaning to do some but some but other design work tends to get in the way.

Mat 10: Naruto back to back: LINK

One of the main things I have learnt recently is that hands are often bigger than you would think Sasuke's are probably a tiny bit too small here. While I like the clean cell shaded look on this mat I could also see it going the other way with strong lighting effects probably blue on the left and red on the right at the time not something I was all that experienced with.

Mat 11: Red Dwarf: LINK

I don't recall what I originally thought this mat would end up looking like but I'm pretty sure this wasn't it, at least not the level of detail anyway. At some point I will have to talk about the use of the vortexes I'm always on about since five of the mats so far have made use of them. Also they are not too big its a trick of the light, and fabric, yeah lest go with that.

Mat 12: Vampire Commander: LINK

And the award for most characters and objects crammed into one design goes to... Putting this one together was something of a jigsaw puzzle, things that could fly clearly go in the top half everybody else down below and size based on a totally made up metric of how useful / cool any given character is. It still holds its record, but thats not though lack of trying on my part.

Mat 13: Star Wars mat 1 or Vader and Friends:  LINK

We will and this part of the list with the first Star Wars mat since it marks the end of one phase of mats and the beginning of the rise of the use of lighting. Still one of my favourite mats everything just seemed to come together as I was colouring it. The signature is hidden as part of the troopers gun. Thinking about it it could also be a precursor to the style used on mats like One Piece.

Other early mats that haven't got a post about them yet include:-
Mat 14: Orkz Party!
Mat 15: Goblin Bombardment
Mat 16: Samurai
Mat 17: Walace and Grommet

Thats it for part one, in part 2 I will cover the Lost Number Series, SWYC Series, EX mats, and Digital.

Disgaea Raspberyl Playmat

The specs for this particular mat as you have probably already gessoed were a pink theme + Raspberyl and her crew. And oh boy is it pink I mean I guess it could be more pink but not by much.

As for the background, after having done quite a few mats of the same style I felt like mixing things up a bit and trying something I haven't really done before. I like to think they are standing in some photo booth in a demon world shopping mall somewhere, at least thats why the diamond checker background, also pink, is at that jaunty angle anyway. 

Originally I had planned to have the scrollwork overlap the characters but by the time I got to that part it was obvious that was both unnecessary and wouldn't have come up very clearly anyway, I've been using these materials for some time now and you get a sense for how things are going to look.

That said evenI was surprised by some of the depth the colours of their hair came out. I did build up quite a few layers while trying to get to the shades I wanted but still.