Another 2012 mat today and its one that features something I don't tend to add to mast designs, card zones.
I have nothing against them personally, its just that most of my designs are either for use in multiple games or don't have the space to feature them. Even here you can see I have only had space to use them on the right of the mat.
This was also the first time I had to draw Grapha, its often amusing when you finally look at higher resolution art as opposed to whats on the card and find things might not have been how you expected, the fact he is wearing so many skulls was a bit of a surprise.
I went with a very restricted pallet for this one and at the time the order I laid the colours down was also a bit unconventional. Both these factors contributed to something that looks quite different from my usual style from around that time. The hints of yellow/green also help give it something of an otherworldly and slightly disconcerting feel.
While the main focus is the two characters and gateway I wanted to have some sort of nod to the other dark world creatures so they found themselves immortalised in stone along the lower part of gateway, getting the angles and shadows right was probably one of the things that took the most time to get looking right.
Snoww could probably do with being a tad more to the right to balance things out a bit more, but then I wouldn't have had the chance to do the card zones. I was pleasantly surprised with the way they turned out to be honest, since opacity is something you can manipulate very easily digitally but is very hard to emulate by hand.