South West Yugioh Champion 2013 Playmat

I'm pretty certain its the fist bump that does it, taking something slightly absurd and pushing it over the edge. I'm the one who designed it and even now I find it slightly disconcerting, even more so when it was fresh from having been initially sketched.

Still thats about what you want from something like this, a one of a kind prize has every right to also be something of a farce, attracting attention is one of its main duties.

We may as well begin at the beginning and while most of these posts start with the first traces of colour on the mat lets roll it back two stages further.

Just after the full scale sketch is done I start adding in any other elements digitally in this case the SWYC logo. Its also an opportunity to move things around, see what works, and change the scale of things. The flip horizontally command is of primary importance at this stage.

I also took this as an opportunity to make sure the logo was the same on both sides, it was actually pretty close before but I decided since I needed to change a few things around anyway I may as well nudge a few things slightly here and there.  Also missing this time are the spikes on the top, removed since otherwise they would have obscured the faces.

You will notice there are some major changes between here and the final image most come down to me realising that I wanted the design to be based on a pair of overlapping V shapes.

I wont bother covering the first few stages so moving ahead slightly I have reorientated and am much happier with the syringe and have decided on the style of the center circle, this time a nod to the spiral from the 2012 mat background, On the other hand I'm still not completely happy with the perspective on Lilly's body and still have to come up with a place for Dark Magician's staff. 

I have been accused of, er, over inflating certain aspects of characters anatomy in the past and while this is something of a jest I would prefer not to draw to much attention to that area in this instance, this thing is silly enough as it is.

I'm not entirely certain why I suddenly went crazy and started on the black at this point, perhapse I had been looking at the mat to long. More likely I wanted to block the wings in and fill up more of the space.

I should probably point out that those are real people depicted on the mat, perhaps you know them, their face's size on the mat are quite close to that of those on the One Piece, Muppet, and Batman mats. This isn't a coincidence as I like the balance of size verses detail that this scale allows while working in my preferred media on these projects. 

For some reason I decided to have the light coming from either side on this mat with the shadows in the center, since both photos that I was basing the faces on had the same lighting that did tend to make things slightly more tricky than it probably needed to be when I finally got around to finishing the faces off.

I had planned to do the background green as a callback to the first SWYC mat but aside from helping me figure out where to put the staff I wasn't really that impressed with the results, it wasn't so much the colour as the lack of anything going on. The black has also been softened quite a bit by this point, more because the other colours have been darkened than anything else so now it wasn't so jarring.

I still have the faces to do but they can wait until last, not happy with the background it gets a pair of red circles with crosses in them and then finished off with a dark blue background featuring swirls that mirror the center spiral. The crosses are meant to reinforce the double V shape, or perhaps the circle with the cross in means they are X-men? 

Or maybe they are hazard signs 

One Piece Playmat

Welcome to 2013 also know as that point in time where I drew quite a lot of people standing in small randomly shaped boxes. Today we look at where all that started.

Sometimes people just know what they want and in this instance it was this image exactly, I cant take any credit for the image this mat is based on so in this instance its more about trying to replicate the original under the constraints of the materials I work in and the shape of the playmat. 

That didn't stop me suggesting alternatives, sketching it out also showed me that the original image was going to need some tweaking to stop it looking stretched out of shape. At this stage its quite obvious some of the faces are really not right but I'm more interested in trying different layouts at the moment.

The transform tool can be a dangerous thing, and if we had gone with this layout the characters would have needed another redraw. I do like the style though so you can be quite sure there will be a mat that features something like it at some point in the near future.

In the end I didn't even try to match the digital cell shaded look of the original and went for something with a bit more texture. Its slightly amusing really a long time ago I used to have this idea that at some point I wanted to create an image so flat it was only one atom thick, but the more i learn and practice the more I find working with light and shadow creates better results than simple solid blocks of colour. A bit like finding out Lichtenstein's graphic and precise dot drawings you see in books are actually massive wall spanning pieces and the dots are anything but uniform. 

Getting the luminosity in the background was probably one of the trickiest things on this project and used up quite a bit of the substance that can remove the colour from the mat, I really need to find a cheeper alternative on that front especially since the darker the colour your trying to remove the more remover you require.  

Don't even get me started on what happens if you let it run, but more on colour flow on playmats another time.

This style has proven quite popular and I have done a number of mats based on it recently which I will discuss more in coming weeks. Until then its worth remembering sometimes you find good ideas in one piece 

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.

Rescue Rabbit Evee Alters

It has been quite hectic of late and I haven't had time to really sit down and write as much as I would like. Which is a bit of a shame as what I want to write will hopefully be quite substantial, in the mean time while I figure out those posts here are a pair of Rescue rabbits dressed as Evee from pokemon.

I think the most surprising thing was that Rabbits pose is so close to Evee's default, the only slight issue being the shape of the ears.

I was tempted to go crazy with background glazes but in the end decided to just add metallic highlights to some of the high points on the characters themselves to help tie them in with the background.