South West Yugioh Champion 2010 Game-Mat

The winner of the First South West Yugioh Championship mat decided he would like cards from the stun deck he used to take him all the way to victory.

The most tricky part of these mats is the text as it can get quite small in places. My favourite element is probably the King Tiger as the metal effect turned out really well, Its also another mat where I end up using green as the dominant background colour, in this case mainly because it was one of the few colours I hadn't really used elsewhere on the mat and I wanted it to pop.

Twilight Game-Mat

In the second mat I created after the transformers mat you can see I have advanced the difficulty slightly trying to combine multiple elements  into one image. At this point I was still drawing the images separately and then combining them into the final piece and its quite obvious. 

At some point I might have to go back and do a new version using all the skills i have learnt since, maybe if the deck ever gets good again, although the card at the centre probably wont see any play which is a shame. 

I also used different black for this and while filling big areas was easier the drying time was somewhat concerning. This mat eventually went on to find its way around the country, I quite like the idea that they are out there being traded and going off to places you would never expect, shame they don't have any way to post their location back, sounds like something interesting someone could do as a university project, probably need to wait for even smaller wireless chips though.

Araby Ogres

The other day we looked essentially at where my conversions started. Today we see some models that are a lot more recent in the form of a squad of ogre bulls. 

As my ogre army is desert themed they needed appropriate attire, being bulls they only get the most basic of clothing so hats and a few hides or shirts. It's always fun converting these guys up, trying to find new variations on what is a pretty standard hat style, or creating some other peice of clothing. The ogres size allows for much more variation than most other armies troops.

To create the standard hats you take a round flat piece of Greenstuff and place it on top of an ogres head then you make a long roll of Greenstuff and begin to wrap it around and in the case of the guy to the left under their heads. Hide coverings are simply just large flat panels of greenstuff overlaid and curved over each other and then marked as needed.

Though I tend to prefer greystuff to greenstuff it seems to have a more organic texture when dry.   

Quick Conversions - Old School

As a new edition of the game imminently desendes on us I thought I would take a look back at some of the very earlierst conversions I created. These were done around the time of second edition  so therefore are only representative of what a very young me was capable of.

So what do you do when as a kid you start a new hobby and only have the starter set and a tank (in this instance not even one that is part of the same army) and could really do with some heavy weapon guys? 

Well as this picture shows you butcher a pair of clip together marines giving one a heavy flamer and tank from a leman russ and strap a hunter killer missile launcher to the head of the other guy. The chaos marine in the picture got a new arm purely by chance I bought a metal chaos space marine terminator one day and he came with 3 arms which even for chaos seemed a bit odd but hey new arm for someone else!

Dante here lost his axe, which as a chapter master was probably a little embarrassing so as a punishment he also ended up loosing his legs. As a first attempt with grenstuff it was a little undefined but everyone has to start somewhere. How he steers or why he is still wearing his jetpack (that makes it a jetbike right?) are anybody's guess.

2nd ed vortex grenades are still the best weapons in the game though.

infernity Infect Game-Mat

When one person asks if you can do an image for someone else, say for a birthday, it then becomes an amusing game to try and find out what that person would like without tipping them off, as you can see from this mat what that person was into at that time was infect cards from MTG and infernity from Yugioh.

The first job on this mat was posing Glissa as I wasn't really a fan of one of her arts and didn't feel the sitting pose was all that interesting from the other. That done it was time compose the full image and once again I have gone with the trusty spirals, I'm even noticing an even larger vortex now that I look back at it that I didn't see before. The scales of each character really dictated their placement, Blightsteel is huge so unless he wanted to only partially be in the image he was going to have to stand at the back.

The blending on Glissa's armour is also one of the first times I was tempted to be a bit loser with the colours than the typical cel shaded look, I have come quite a long way from there to the mat I have just finished with doesn't use fine-liners, not that theres anything wrong with them but it was something I had been meaning to try for some time, but more on that another time.

Glacial Fortress - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Time for another card from the Tempered Steel Deck and this time its one of the two nonbasic land.

One thing you have to be very aware of when altering other people's art are the dimensions the original piece was created in, additionally there is usually some cropping when the art is added to the card frame which can throw things off slightly too. this is important because if your not careful you can lose the focus of the work. For example there are many very accomplished lightning bolt extensions of the most recent art, the problem is while they add some very nice looking mountains suddenly the image just looks like a basic land with some fancy lightening.

The same thing applies here I could have extended the rocky icy downwards but this image is all about the sheer scale of the monument, your meant to be starting up at this imposing barrier towering above you. That said looking back at it now I would probably add subtle hints of rocky structures a bit further down, dark but another to blend it in a bit more.

Vampire Game-Mat

I think my favourite requests are the ones I would have never thought about, things that go beyond the obvious. Sometimes you go wow why didn't I think of that and others you go, right hows that going to work. When someone gives you a list of the top 20 to 30 cards from their MTG Commander Vampire deck and asks you to put as many as possible on a mat it turns out to be a bit of both.

In the end I decided the best corse of action was just to represent the creatures and physical objects as spells tend to be a bit random in their tone and are more difficult to get the meaning across. From there it was just a matter of trying to squeeze everyone in while maintaining some from of layout, in this case a large triangle that draws yours focus across and down the design then back up again. I could probably have filled the whole mat with images but sometimes less is more and I really wanted to get some form of skyline in partly to tie the three characters with towers in their are into the rest of the image, partly to get bad moon and the black mana symbol in, but mostly because I didn't want the whole thing to be flesh tones and purple.

Working slightly more loosely with the colours on this one with quite a bit of blending going on the peice only really came together for me once I started working on the little details. this mainly involved the artefacts, finding good places to hide them to be discovered later of choosing suitable characters to hold them. My favourite elements are probably the massive impact that vast area of bright yellow has and the tower the nocturnus is standing in. 

Red Dwarf Custom Playmat

Finding reference material for this mat proved quite tricky, between the fact that the design of the ship has changed and the vast majority of the images come from low res stills most likely taken from VHS  just added to the task of trying to get the faces to look right.

Still I'm quite pleased with the end result, theres a lot more detail in the ships than I was anticipating and I like the way the group pose has come together. The background is another case of the person who asked for the design giving me free rein to come up with anything, and while I was initially worried it would look as though the characters were floating I think in the end I gives an interesting backdrop while helping draw your eye around the design.

Quick Conversions - Tau Hazard VF1 head and Magnets

I havent shown many conversions of late so lets rectify that with a look at a simple conversion I did to my Tau Hazard suit that will act as the team leader. 

Firstly we have the head which has had the crest removed and antenna from other Tau models mounted on the sides in an attempt to give it a similar profile to that of the head of one of the Veritechs from Robotech/Macross. a straightforward conversion whos only real issue is that the antenna in question only face one way so if you want the finished result to look more polished you will have to cut and turn one of them around.

The other main element was magnetising the burst cannons, again a relatively straightforward procedure (best to wear a mask when dealing with resin) in this case made more tricky through the lack of a drill bit that matched the size of the magnet. Obviously having gone though this procedure on 2 other suits as well Forgeworld decided that the other weapon options would come fused to the arm elements, sneaky. Still between the magnets and the metal rod pinning the heads in place it did make the suits much easier to paint, and I can always use the weapons on my crisis suits and one of my tanks which are also magnetised.

Digital Game-Mats

To celebrate the fact that I finaly have a decent graphics tablet, albeit one thats probably 10+ years old, todays post is going to look at some of the digital designs I have done at one time or another.

First up is a pair of designs based on the MTG concept of the red zone (battle area), an image of an adhesive explosive, some text that relates to MFM and is in a suitably Yugioh style font, and in this first image's case a breakdown of the phases that constitute a turn sequence in Yugioh. The main thing you can do digitally thats quite a bit more difficult by hand is all the fancy opacity effects, you can also go back and change things as you like as long as you have them on separate layers. the down side of course is that you have to find someone who can print the thing on the material in full colour, at a reasonable price.

Its sort of a shame that "There is no sub-step four" never became a meme, i could see that text with a little pixelated Honest being quite cool on a t-shirt.

In any case the second version moves things about a bit to feature a full set of card zones. I don't tend to do zones on non digital mats as again they would come under opacity issues and they tend to take up most of the space I would rather fill with designs. The exception to this though is when the overall design calls for them, for example when they themselves can become strong elements of the background design. Or if I was do a Cardfight mat, but even then I think you could replace the zones with other marker elements.

Sometimes I find that ideas just need to be put to paper, or in this case 0's and 1's. At the time I just felt like drawing transformers and this was one of the results. It could probably do with more background elements some sort of vista perhaps but thats the nice thing about digital you can leave things and come back to them much later to change things up or add new ideas. Incidentally I do have quite a cool idea for a new transformers design (non digital) but I have a number of other mats to get out of the way first.

Which brings us back to why I needed a decent tablet in the first place. This particular design reached a point where a mouse just wasn't cutting it (not to mention an obscene file size). Though that is another upside of non digital design, you never run out of space and you can't lose a load of work to a system crash or slowdown.