Bayonetta Playmat

There is some debate as to whether or not spines are useful structures. Personally I find mine handy for keeping my upper body from being somewhere around my waist. Bayonetta's designers clearly feel differently however, often contorting her into a wide array of painfully impossible poses.

Her chiropractor must make a fortune.

Back Pain aside I have a few more mats from 2012 to get through before I start on 2013 and this is one of them.

Two things happened before I started production of this mat the first was I figured out how to do white on a much larger scale, not just leave white space but actually add white, and secondly I bought a different brand of black for the line work. these two elements combined to inform the overall look of the final piece with its much lighter than my usual colour schemes and a generally more realistic looking face and hair, although that may have as much to so with scale as anything else. A few mats on and I think maybe I would have gone a bit darker with it and if you have been reading my posts you will notice I havent been able to resist having an element of an orange sky in there somewhere, but overall for what it is and what I learnt from crating it I am quite happy with the end results.

As far as the curvature of her spine goes, after some research into gymnastics, I settled on something not quite as extreme as most artwork depicts her. I could have pushed the curve a bit more, real people can bend slightly more than I have depicted, but the sketches where I did proved that it didn't take much to push it over the edge from believable to somewhat silly looking.

Much like the characters famed flexibility its also my first mat to have been designed to work either way around which explains the rather nondescript horizon and general jaunty angle everything is draw at. There are a number of extra details that you have to consider when you decide to do this sort of thing though, the main one being that you really need to get the shadows right, which probably explains the minimal shadowing on the background elements. Its also why I prefer to view the image this way up since it was the direction I worked on the mat the most and therefore makes the most sense to me. People who haven't worked on it however may have other opinions and thats one of the nice things about this style, the added decision making.

I was quite a way into production before i noticed I had neglected to add her glasses though, thankfully I remembered as it also solved an issue I was having with her hair making her look to masculine when viewed one way around, its funny how things work out sometimes, one little detail can change everything.

Scryed Dragonball: Goku Vs kazuma Playmat

Ok so I know I implied the Lightsworn mat was the last of 2012 but sometimes a little misdirection is required. In this case because this mat was created as a Christmas present for my brother uploading it beforehand would have given the game away.

People often find buying gifts for others somewhat challenging, "they are difficult to buy for" they cry or "they already have everything,  could buy it for themselves!". I've always found this line of thinking somewhat odd if your buying gifts for people chances are you have spent some amount of time with them that year and as such sooner or later they will mention at least one thing they probably would like, often without realising it, you just have to be listening.

Maybe thats the real issue.

In any case when my brother mentioned that a Goku Vs kazuma playmat would be quite cool I immediately agreed and then set about subverting the whole concept the final result being bellow.

Combine the fact he plays quite a lot of wargames with the characters general predisposition to fighting and you get the idea. Still while this was always meant as a joke since drawing all those tiny models on a playmat would have been interesting to say the least the basic concept filed itself away for later use.

The final mat then and you will notice that while Goku is at his maximum level in both images kazuma is not. Comparing relative power levels between characters in different series is somewhat redundant, however, for the second design I decided that if they are going to fight you may as well have all involved at their maximum capacity, partly to add emphasis to the combat and partly to minimise debate as to who should win, because we all know how people like to debate such things.

The other major element with this mat was that I went a bit crazy with the use of the black, you have to imagine theres a light source above and slightly behind both characters mainly because I came to the conclusion that I didn't want to have a mat with some sort of landscape style background. With that in mind the elements of the image that were further from that source or obscured by other elements gradually became darker and darker and for a time I was concerned the style wouldnt look right on characters that are generally flat shaded though in the end I came to the conclusion it adds to the overall momentum of the image.

As for the background itself I went with the old Dragonball trick of using a patterned background to give the sense of movement. A technique generally used in animation to save time and funds so animators can get episodes done much more quickly, and used in Yugioh cards because...well I'm not to sure I would assume originally it was to make the characters stand out since the image frame is quite small and a proper background could potentially make it harder to see but more likely since many of the Japanese TCG's only tend to focus on the characters its probably a cultural thing. Back on topic, the dragonballs and Scryed necklace were added because I felt the background needed just a bit more detail than just some diagonal lines. It took me some time to decide on the colour of the stars eventually settling on the cartoons version.

The final touch and something I could only really trial on a mat that hadn't been requested for fear it's application would somehow cause the image to spontaneously react and melt away or some other nightmarish effect that could befall an image that I had spent countless hours on was to add pigments resistant to sunlight and that would generally provide another barrier against water and the substances that may be on a players hands and cards. My mats have been relatively water resistant for some time now, I don't advise testing it out on purpose though, but its nice to be able to add a further layer of protection.

And so in one fell swoop I now only have one major Jump series left to create a mat for, not that I have done a mat for the best Jump show yet but then I suspect there is little call for a Busou Renkin mat and  therefore would have to make it for myself if I ever wanted to make one.