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.
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