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.