Inzektor Custom Playmat

The latest mat that I have completed brought with it a host of new ideas and challenges primarily among them was not actually talking to the person who wanted it which was slightly odd as i am used to being able to gage peoples reactions and get feedback from them. 

This mat is also quite deceptive theres quite a bit going on that your meant to discover over time mostly this comes through in the background where the most obvious example would be the hex pattern playing on the idea of a hive but it goes all the way down to the pose the characters are doing. The characters themselves are quite interesting in that their designs are clearly influenced by super hero shows like Karmen Rider which makes me think Konami wanted to make something with a similar feel to E Hero's, just with more internal synergy.

Something I didn't really pay much attention to at the time but the green backgrounds for the equipments were clearly influenced by the cards border colour, not doing the traps on purple was clearly either a missed opportunity or me deciding I didn't want the background to merge to much with the characters, most likely the latter.

The other major thing different about this mat is that during it's production I took pictures of it developing so heres a video created using those images.

Though I could do with some way to suspend my camera/phone above the mats so it stays in the same place :)

Lightsworn Game-Mat Concept

Something a bit different today as we delve into a look at how I design mats. This particular design was originally done for the owner of the Bleach mat but was never taken past the design stage.

Which is a bit of a shame really because it was one of the most complex and time consuming designs to do, just figuring out how to fit everyone in was quite tricky and several of the characters took multiple revisions before getting to this final point. working at actual size is vital for something like this, trying to do all the characters separately and then compositing them all in later culd have worked but wouldn't have led to such an integrated image.

Unfortunately Lightsworn arnt a popular deck at the moment so this design is unlikely to see a full colour version for the foreseeable future.

Dispatch - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

The Dispatches were an interesting set of alters, between the orange and purple colour scheme and the chance to extend the art over other elements of the card frame. I'm still not entirely sure how many limbs this bug person ie meant to have though,

Ravnica Karoo Land Alters

I really enjoy altering lands, These three were no exception, while they are relatively simple you still have to try and maintain the feel of the place with whatever you plan on adding.

My favorite is probably the one in the middle, ok the  perspectives not perfect but the minimalism of the colours exudes eeriness. The Garrison was probably the most technically difficult, I like the way the arch frames the city and it took some time to get right.

Reborn Game-Mat

This holds the record for the mat that took the longest to do at somewhere in the range of 80 hours. to be fair most of that was research as apposed to production time as initial going into the design I had very little idea of what the person who wanted the mat was after. I find its very important to be able to figure out what it is the person your making things for actually wants there is often that unexplainable something that if you don't find you can tell they arnt as enthused as if you hit the target that falls closest to their expectations or aspirations. On the other hand sometimes people don't know what they want and its your job to find it for them.

203 episodes later I had a better Idea of what they were after and an appreciation of what each characters personalities were like (as well as finding out that the show is generally very good although I prefer the stuff pre future arc and it could do with a Dragonball kai style recut to get rid of all the recaps) the next challenge was fitting everyone onto the mat at a decent size. 

Something you might notice is that theres a slight shift in placement near the bottom middle this is from the scanning process after the mat is complete and doesn't exist on the original trying to scan a piece of material thats slightly bigger than 2 sheets of A4 wide in an A4 scanner is a tad problematic and requires some trial and error along with some slight image adjustment when the slices are put back together.

Porcelain Legionnaire - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Picked randomly from the pile, next up from the Tempered Steel Deck we have this guy. The sky was obviously quite straightforward for these which with the number of card I had to do was a plus, the ground however not so much again matching purples can be a pain but I think we got there in the end. B because the subject of the art is central and doesn't overlap the boarders I think my favourite element of the card is the sunrise/set in the background.

One of the four of these was Russian which did lead to a situation where I wold have quiet liked to add some sort of big furry hat to the character and while most people seemed to think that would be amusing in the end it comes down to what the owner wants and he didn't seem as enthused about the idea so it was dropped.

Bleach Game-Mat

I got the impression that the person I did this mat for would quite like to see it on the site so here goes.

While the Star Wars mat took black ink to the extreme my current trend of trying to make the mats a bit more bold really started with this project. Here I am still a bit tentative with the use of the black preferring to let the greys do most of the heavy lifting shading wise on the clothes, mainly because the black was the first colour i laid down and wasn't sure at the time how dark the rest of the image would end up, and I really wanted the characters to pop.

Which is how the background came about, going for fresh vibrant colours in large solid blocks was an attempt to replicate the cool contemporary stylings of the series first intro. Whenever i see the mat in person the bright green always makes me smile, theres just something about the way it looks that makes me think 'good choice' when i think back to how originally those sections were going to be yellow,. 

Compositionally like many of my pieces theres a major spiral theme going on, I just like vortexes it seems.

Ponder - Tempered steel deck alter

This ponder is relatively straight forward as the vast majority of the extension will be a dark purple/ black colour so theres not much to say about this image, the other way to go would be to totally change the image but thats not what the owner was after. the ponder with the menfolk on it on the other hand is a totally different matter altogether.

MTG Alters Sorin & Sacred Foundry

The second more up to date project I will be looking at today is a pair of MTG alters.

The sacred Foundry actually went quite a bit more smoothly than I had anticipated as orange and yellow tend to be a pain to work with especially when it comes to colour matching. Sorin on the other hand was quite a different beast. Having not worked on a Planeswalker before i was a little hesitant at first this quickly faded as i worked on the card. Of more interest was the fact that i began altering without looking at a larger version of the original image.

This led to some interesting assumptions on my part the biggest of which leading to me adding a river to the bottom right of the image, theres also a second volcano in the original art that seems to have been cropped from the cards art. Finally finding a version of the original made the whole composition make more sense and i added all the trees that had been missing from the left hand side including the very large one that I had assumed was just some sort of billowy cloth. on the right i added a forest as i felt the mountain looked a bit on the bear side. Was my original version any less right than what i ended up with? probably not but i am glad I did add the trees to the left the autumn colours and the shapes add quite a bit to the image, the rivers still theres though meandering its way behind the trees.

Star Wars Game-Mat

We are jumping ahead a bit here to some things I have just completed, starting with my latest playmat.

This was definitely one of the trickier ones I have had to do for two main reasons firstly that the person who asked for it is a major Star Wars fan, to a point where he even had his own shop selling Star Wars stuff at one point. This meant I knew that things had to look right, attention to detail was going to be a major point in the design.

Secondly he wanted it dark, like really dark, thats actually more of a problem. The issue here is that while the black ink looks black on paper the material used to make the mats tends to absorb a lot of pigment meaning even the extra black pen i bought with something like this in mind tends to dry a bit grey. There was clearly no option then, i would have to cheat.

By which I mean try and fool the eye, which is why the background is two layers of blue with a layer of black sandwiched in between and a sprinkling of other hues to add depth here and there. Also why lord Vader is lit up as he is (we assume his lightsaber or other dark side force powers are just off screen)

All the messing around with lighting effects did give me the opportunity to avoid using outlines for the most part which was a nice change from the usual cartoon style art I tend to work with. The most difficult choice however was what colour to do the stormtrooper? From a purely lighting based standpoint he should have a much greater amount of green on him, on the other hand the white helmet is both iconic and something people expect. Sometimes when you are doing these projects you have to ask yourself what other people will say when they see the piece for the first time and I would prefer it to be wow thats cool rather than why is that trooper green?

These mats do use quite a lot of colour and rather unsurprisingly this particular one went through a vast quantity of black, also noteworthy is that while doing reserch the majority of images i found of Fet had him standing rigid looking forward or casually to the right, hardly very dynamic or fitting for someone who's ment to be this amazing bounty hunter.