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.