Naruto Game-Mat

I once overheard someone saying that thy thought this mat looked like a proper anime mat, the fact that at least initially one of my pieces can do that to someone is incredibly heartening as pens don't generally replicate something generated digitally very easily especial on fabric.

Probably one of the few mats I have done where i have been comfortable leaving so much white space in a design as generally i like to fill the whole page with colour but the design and the art style really demanded it and it makes a nice change of pace.

Naruto's hand in the bottom left was also quite difficult to get right, hands are not easy at the best of times so it took me quite some time to come up with a position that looked right.

So I have done Naruto, Bleach, and Reaborn mats, about the only big Shonen anime I haven't done yet is Dragonball, although I would quite like to do a Buso Renkin mat at some point.

Memnite - Tempered Steel Deck

One of the trickier pieces both because of its colour pallet and the weird scale these cards took some time to get right. I also made things more complicated for myself by making the ground each one is standing on unique since having them all the same seemed a bit dull.

While I think I managed to get the colours right and the ground effects came out quite well the scale is probably always going to be an issue, Ideally i would like to add a big rock or tall grass to the right side of the image but the power and toughness box is in the way. the other idea I quite liked but got shot down was to have various birds looking at them for example a big squadron hawk looming over the Memnite.

Mox Opal - Tempered Steel Deck

I would really have liked to have more time working with the opals, as it was with the task of simply extending the deck there wasn't really a great deal I could add to this card as I didn't want to add more leaves making the image potentially lopsided of pulling focus away from the gem itself.

Given more time i would have designed some sort of new background for the art the arms and gem could stay but I never really got the reason for the leaves, its not like its a lotus.

Signal Pest - Tempered Steel Deck

This was probably one of the most interesting alters from the tempered steel simply because it involved adding new things to the image rather than simply extending existing content.

Getting the yellows right can be slightly tricky as its just behind white for colours with the lowest pigment content and theres always the temptation to lay it on to thick but i think I got there in the end.

Lava Golem Game-Mat

This is the first mat I've done directly without some sort of 1:1 design, sure iI had a small scale sketch but putting pencil to fabric without a guide was briefly concerning. Once you get going though things tend to fall into place as long as you keep things in scale - finding the centre and working from there can help quite a bit.

I'm very aware that the final M can be misinterpreted as a N because of the design, usually I try to make sure my designs have as much comprehension as possible, its why the stormtrooper in the Star Wars mat is white rather than green. In this instance I felt the fact that the letter was melting was worth the increase in error rate plus it can serve as a way of starting a conversation "Team MFN who are they?" "its MFM actually"

I wasn't really keen on the character in the cage of the original image so that got changed up a bit, the original image is also a tad darker but the way the lava was turning out on this version I decided going that dark wasn't really necessary. My favourite parts are probably the metal effect on the text and the lava streams mainly just because of the effects they employ and how they turned out. 

Despite the short deadline I managed to get this mat done in time for it to be used at nationals here in the UK and it went on to feature in a number of the final matches, its always nice getting to see your work out wild in the world.