Pokemon Team Custom Playmat

So where was I, ah yes orrery's. I've spoken a number of times about the various layouts you could use to help you create more interesting images from the golden ratio to the rule of thirds but sometimes you just want to base your layout on  mechanical devices that attempt to represent how the solar system works.

No? Just me then.

It almost didn't work, or rather had one of the Pokemon been different it may have been a totally different picture. Having both snake looking Pokemon to balance each other out turned out to be quite a major aspect of the design.

Similarly my original concept had much more of a mechanical clockwork theme I had intend to have all  the characters inside circles with the background full of cogs and other mechanical designs. However when the circles had been dawn out it became apparent that the background was going to end up larger than the characters, and since they were the main focus, that probably wasn't the right way of doing things. 

After much thought, something I did notice however was that the circles were about the right size and spaced far enough apart that they could be used to place the head of the Pokemon and the bodies would fit in around them, there wouldn't be any need to have background elements because somewhat magically all the characters filled the space pretty much perfectly. 

Not that the circles themselves were particularly easy to draw in the first place. its one of those times you wish you had bigger plates, or a large compass posibly like one you would find on a wooden sailing vessel (theres something of a old school navigation theme running though is project I'm now noticing). In the end I had to settle for a large amount of measuring with a ruler, a looped piece of string and a pencil, for anyone tempted to try this at home the string should preferably not be elasticated it tends to throw the measurements out which in turn means you have to spend more time measuring.

Having the starting circles placed it was then a matter of arranging the characters and as I say they came together rather easily. Possibly this was in part due to the fact that the question 'where should each go?' was answered with 'well similar colours opposite each other obviously' when theres only two yellow objects in the image clearly my brain felt having them next to each other would imbalance the whole piece, since the rest of me agreed the drawing process could begin.

I'm terms of colouring, having recently bought  new black colour and remover I promptly managed to use both up again on this project. I especially like the way the lighting effects seem to decrease as they move out from the center, the effects on Steelix also came out particularly well I also feel.

I've drawn Pikachu a large number of times now to the point where I can draw him/her from memory and each time he/she seems to be enjoying themselves quite a lot, by the looks of things this mood seems to infected the rest of the team in this image.

Then again I don't suppose theres much call for grimdark Pokemon

Untill next time, Pikachu (and friends) I choose you (to explore the solar system).

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