Kung Fu Panda vs Snowman Eater Playmat

Ok so lets try and go a week without orange in vast quantities shall we? Today its orange's best friend Teal! Digital colour grading has a lot to answer for...

I spent quite a bit of time looking at various fighting game user interfaces for ideas for the life bars and backgrounds, settling in the end for something thats a bit of a mix of everything, it also had the affect of reminding me it would be nice if they made a new Bloody Roar game though as thats not really relevant here. What is relevant is that the entire time I was working on this mat I couldn't help thinking about Clay Fighter and how Yugioh cards would look in that style, this thought ended up being a major influence on the design more thought the movement aspect rather than stylistically.

I'm sure the background much come from somewhere, the buildings are all based on research but the overall composition seems to be based on either the kung fu panda movie or the new WOW expansion or possibly from me watching far to much anime and kung fu movies over the years, it had to come in useful somewhere I suppose. The sky initially looked wrong, well it was ok but there was just this feeling of off'ness, after some time studying images of the sky it hit me that the gradient was up the wrong way, what was more of a sunset before ended up being a sunrise and looking better for it.

While I did briefly consider adding attack effects and some sort of contact effect would have been quite cool the vs in the background would have suffered for it (what I had originally planned would have taken up much of the centre of the mat) perhaps if I ever get some sort of semitransparent glow in the dark colour. Instead I ended up bringing some of the sky colours into the foreground image to provide lighting effects and because snow is very reflective it would have looked weird as just a big blob of white.

As I mentioned in the Gravekeeper mat post I have started hiding easter eggs in the designs lately and this is no exception, the the snowman eater isn't the only one of his kind in this image and there are a number of other things too.

This is actually a birthday mat but for a change one where the details were all very well know before hand which makes a nice change, the tighter the design restrictions the easier it is to come up with ideas usually, its also not something I would have ever considered by myself.

I do feel sorry for the snowman though, being dragged into this fight against its will.

Stun City Playmat

We take a look back in time today, once again to one of the earlier mats I worked on, in this case Yugioh Hero's vs Stun creatures.

You can tell its one of my earlier designs because of how much white space is left and, looking back on it now, the alarming lack of proper lighting.

Not to say there isn't shading but colour to white doesn't really seem all that interesting to me now and feels a bit basic. On the other hand I guess the upside is it does make it quite easy to upgrade this mat, it would get much darker but it might be an interesting change. It's something I haven't really mentioned before but in a number of the mats I have done I like to leave some chance for future upgrades, the Inzektor  mat is an obvious one because of the empty cells, same with the Bleach and Kung fu Panda mats though again any additions would have to be darker than the current background colour but it is possible.

Still even if the clouds are a bit jarring, I would probably do them dark now, I still like the overall composition I like that theres so much going on and it feels like an actual fight sequence, it can be quite difficult to get movement to look right sometimes. it does makes me wonder what happens next, does Captain Gold smash into Doom Caliber Knight or does the shield bat him away, Thunder King's clearly having a bad day being punched in the face like that whatever happens though.

I used to draw buildings quite a bit in ye olden days so its quite nice being able to occasionally drop a load of them in the background of one of these mats when the subject is right, I've even got one mat design laying around thats just all city but that will have to wait until I figure out how create something more along the lines of a water colour effect.

As per usual the horse proved problematic at first, my own fault for choosing odd angle for them I suppose, like hands they are something I'm getting better at, luckily unlike hands they don't get asked for as often. 

These older mats always make me wonder where they ended up.

Next week more orange? or perhaps something a bit different?

Gravekeepers Game-Mat

In my last post we looked at a mat from a while ago that had started a trend towards rather vibrant atmospheric effects. Today we look at the second to last mat I have completed, which takes orange to its most extreme leves thus far.

I would like to point out its not really my fault, Necrovalley was already this orange, still I cant say I didn't enjoy colouring it :)

This mat was another one of those which finds itself in the birthday category, a limbo where you need information on what the target likes while maintaing ninja like stealth, luckily while the parents who asked for the mat didn't really know, the owner of our local gaming store (check out the MFM link on the side bar for more info) is pretty good at keeping track of all his customers preferred decks, personalities and names and was able to give me pointers as to what the eventual recipent would like.

Clearly we settled on Gravekeepers, an archetype in Yugioh that has its roots in the dark depths of the games past but with more recent good cards has managed to stay a relatively high level deck for some years. My first decision was not to bother drawing the majority of the original batch of cards, while they have some stylistic similaritys with the later ones few see play and they look a bit dated. This in mind I settled on keeping the character count down to the cards that see the most play and maybe some cameo appearances if there was room.

Somehow I also had to fit Necrovalley itself, a large stone tablet, a sphinx and most challengingly a dragon into the space. It didn't take long for me to decide I should be using the land as a background, the pyramids in the distance would be handy for scale and I could sit the sphinx next to them, a rocky outcrop on the left side was perfect for a character to sit on and I figured commandant looked moody/cool enough to prop up the other side of the image. the rest was just filling in the spaces leaving enough room for as much of the background as possible. 

Then there was the dragon.

Getting the angles right took quite a bit of trial and errot and I still think he;s possibly not foreshortened enough towards the back end, but on the other hand he could have ended up squished up and I really wanted him to cover part of the sun. Ideally it would also cast a shadow into the valley but at the angle and hight he is flying the shadow should be somewhere off the bottom edge of the mat, I could have fudged it but felt there was to much chance it would look 'wrong' and I was saving the huh moments for other characters.

Lighting was very important to me in this image, with the sun so very clearly visible there was no real excuses for odd lighting patterns. this is also why while the cards art features quite a bit of white the characters in this image have had those areas changed to shades of yellow and orange, all the dust in that desert isn't going to give you pure white edge to your clothes, especially when your standing in a narrow rock formation. The last thing to be done on the mat was the light rays something that could have gone horibly wrong and ruined the image but ended up making the while thing work for me, not to mention being something I just would not have been able to do when I started out on this adventure.

While most of the characters maintain their looks from the cards, even if descendant looks like he's trying to call down a lightning bolt, I did take some liberties with spy. There was just so little to work with and I wasn't a fan of her face so I took what strong elements there were and built the rest of the body based on the sitting pose and the style of the other characters. She might even be a he in the original art but I felt it was ambiguous enough to just go with it.

Finally we have all the easter eggs something I seem to be adding more of to mats of late, while I wont spoil them all as the whole point is to keep coming back to the image and finding new things the most obvious is the millennium puzzle the spy is holding. Others inclide a number of animals and a famous sci-fi spaceship.

Tau custom weapons and mounts

Having recently played in an apocalipse game of Warhammer 40K and only having three railguns in a Tau army of just under 3000 points I decided something had to be done. I have plenty of crisis suits but only two Broadsides for backup so considering that all my regular suits were magnetised anyway what if I built some railguns so they could do double duty?

After some searching around the net for ideas I came across a post on Advanced Tau Tactica in which the author had used Cable ties for the beams of the weapons, noting that many of the other ideas involved components I didn't have access to I decided to give it a go.

As you can see from the picture above I have already created two pairs of guns for suits and something somewhat more substantial for my Skyray, the large guns in the background are a pair of twin linked plasma guns also built to be used on the same mounting but lets start with the suit railguns.

Being all out of fusion blasters, and any Tau battlesuit weapons for that matter, I ended up using Space Marine tank Auto Cannons as the rear of the new guns, partly as I had a number which would maintain a visual style but mostly because I liked the look of the ammo feed, though I new in the end it would probably have to be removed so the gun would mount both on the arms and shoulders of the weapons. The size of the host wepons was also useful as it allowed for the ties to sit next to each other leaving a small gap creating that traditional railgun feel. 

After searching with no luck through my bits box for components that would look good as the front end of thee weapons I settled on just using card and carefully wrapping it around the ties, a coating of superglue is then applied to turn the card into something approximating plasticard. The next stage will be to add more metal plates to the 3 guns I haven't finished yet to allow the magnets to attract them, this first one has metal on two sides allowing for both horizontal and vertical positioning as suspected though the feed had to go which was a bit of a shame.

On the tank front, having rescued a rather dilapidated Skyray I took the opportunity to add magnets to where the missile racks would normally attach. the whole turret mount is also removable and can be attached to both this tank and one other that have both had their top hatches removed and replaced by a modified drone that the turret can attach to. The missle racks and railgun have then had metal added, the plasma guns will probably need magnets sunk into them as they are a little heavier.

Of course the best part about magnets is you can swap things about a bit, though admittedly this particular load out may be a little impractical for most combat situations. It also means the Hazard suits  I featured a while ago can use any of these weapons, they would make cool looking Broadsides though the base size is an issue.

Boba Fet Game-Mat

I mentioned last time that a number of mats of late have tended towards the orange and this is where it started. 

After completing the first Star Wars mat I got asked if I could do something similar, except they only wanted Boba Fet on it. Initially I couldn't help thinking three Fets on one mat was a little overkill but with some discussion and a number of sketches we manage to figure out this three panel layout, all I had to do next was figure out what to do with the two side panels 

Ok, so the one on the left is not exactly historically accurate but the cool factor always trumps historical accuracy (it is written by the victors after all) and I guess thats what the expanded universe is for.  I would have quite liked to add more atmospheric effects but theres generally not much cloud cover on this particular desert planet.

We make up for it though on the right side where I get to go to town, well drawing a town. I do like drawing buildings and such like though I may have over done the level of detail, but then I wanted to try and tell a story with Fet overlooking the parked Falcon and its occupants heading into the city proper, even if they are stick figures at that size.

As it was the middle section appeared fully formed as the first piece of the puzzle before I had even thought about the other two images, having spent so much time looking at references for the first mat I could get most of the outline done from memory which was helpful as it meant I could start the design on the spot and the person who wanted the design could supply feedback.

I seem to have had to draw quite a lot of guns lately as well, hands are tricky things but with the amount I have had to draw lately I have definitely been improving, something I will probably talk about when we get to the Walking Dead mat.