22 August 2013

Hunders Custom Playmat

You can tell this is another 2013 mat, partly due to the artistic style but mostly due to the 'cinematic' bands at the top and bottom: 'Coming to a theatre this fall, when was the last time thunder hurt anyone?'

It definitely caused me some Issues though, at the time the cards weren't even out yet over here and I'm not sure that they had english names either both of which made finding info about them quite tricky.

In the end I looked to the manga for inspiration this had the added benefit of providing a more detailed look at their costumes, personalities and some additional poses something you cant always guarantee being able to have available when working with Yugioh creatures. Having more viewpoints to work from when examining characters is always a plus, especially since there is quite a lot of Yugioh art with some really weird poses or foreshortening that can leave things looking very odd.

Speaking of which, ugh Utopia's card is a pain to work with, dynamic sure but where are his legs? Not to mention the fact his sword blocks half the art. It was again quite lucky that there were other views of him - being the signature creature for a series tends to help in that regard. The shape and position of the horns on his helmet can also cause weird effects, they were one of the elements that it took me the most time to get looking accurate since he seems to be built of quite a number of convex and concave surfaces that at first glance don't tend to make a lot of sense at certain angles. Starliege wasn't quite so bad, his left leg is a bit odd but at least all the major detail is clearly visible on the card, and he has the added benefit of looking like something out of Tekkaman Blade.

Being thunder themed creatures they obviously have electricity effects (should be sound themed really I would have thought) and that gets reflected in the mats background, the angle the photo was taken at also lets you see hints of the white effects on the characters that also have feature lighting style effects, although these shift depending on your viewing angle.

My favourite element though, and something i wasn't even sure would work, is Starliege's sword. Getting it to look transparent was somewhat nerve racking as you slowly build up and mix colour.

12 August 2013

Avengers Custom Playmat

Finally I can talk about a mat I created over two months ago, now I just need to remember what I wanted to say about it...

Lets start with the basics; Birthday present so basically top secret, luckily I had a pretty good idea of which characters they preferred which explains this particular lineup. I also knew that doing it in a similar style to the Batman mat was something they would prefer, and now we can have Marvel Vs DC when they play against each other.

On my side I knew I wanted to try something other than a black background and that I wanted to push the design further in other ways too although I wasn't sure what they were yet. With all these things considered and after much research we skip past the initial sketch and go straight into looking at the production  



1. Much like the Batman Mat I have used tape to mask off areas in order to lay the large red area down quickly, also like the batman mat I have to build a stencil to mask off the logo, except this time I have to be much more precise, which is tricky with masking tape especially the tight angles.

I have also started blocking in the general shapes with a pale pink, mostly on the red areas while in figure 2 i do the same with the rest. The advantage here is that if you make a mistake it doesn't matter because the colours will be lost under the finished image anyway.

3. I start shading the red areas since red seems to be the most dominant colour in the image. Ideally you should probably lay down basic block colour for all the elements of the image before starting on the shading but I don't know what the background is going to look like yet and also don't feel like working on certain characters just yet.

In 4 and 5 I move on to the blues since there is also quite a few of them in the image, I skip Wolverine for much the same reason as the previous paragraph, typically if there is an element of the image I'm leaving until later its because I want to give myself more time to think about how to do it, and Wolverine's costume and pose was one of the most time consuming parts of preproduction. I went through half a dozen different poses (remembering that they also had to work in the context of the small space he had to fit in) and several different styles before settling on this final one. 

As we are woking on blue anyway at this point I figure I will also darken the reds while I am at it and add some purple to act as shadows, although I'm still not 100% on where the light source actually is yet.

6. I finally start on darkening and shading Wolverine, I've gone with his costume from the 80's cartoon partly because its one of the more iconic ones but mainly because thats the version I grew up watching so its easiest to remember. Also because it felt he would look a little out of place if everyone else in the image is wearing their costumes and he was just wearing a leather jacket.


Aside from the fact Iron man was always in the middle the final layout came quite late. Thor was initially on the other side and Spiderman wasn't always upside down. Having decided on the final layout of the characters I still had no idea what the background would look like however after working on the mat for a while I did know that i wanted the cells to be more integrated than the other mats. Part of that comes though in the way Hulk is trying to break out of his and Captain America is clearly in front of Scarlet Witch but I also wanted the background to cross the whole image as well. 


7. In the end I decided to just wing it, Spiderman was clearly hanging from something he needs a building behind him, Scarlet Witch may as well share it since she is flying, lets just use the cell wall as a marker and draw parallel lines from that. We also have an image where the center character is at the bottom of a v shape so the other lines can run in that direction and then boom you have yourself your first building.

8. the rest of the background fell into place quite easily after that, many of the buildings are inspired by the skyline from the Avengers movie and I even managed to get Stark Tower and the Baxter building in there. The hardest part was maintaining the perspective, both sides had to work their way down to a vanishing point somewhere behind Iron Man's head. And yes it is another orange sky, but there was no way I was doing a blue one when i had the opportunity to do skyscrapers with orange reflections.

9. Now the background was done and I have a better idea of where the light and shadows are going to be I start working on the areas I have left up to this point. Another thing this mat shares with the batman mat is that many of the characters are a blend of both the movie and comic versions, Iron Man's reactor cover for example was triangular for a while but in the end I decided that I preferred the round one similarly Thor is mostly based on the movie version as is Captain America. That said I'm not all that fussed about exact costume accuracy, the most important thing for me is 'can you look at the image from across the room and tell who these people are?' After that you can get into the minutia of things if your that way inclined.

10. I've skipped ahead a bit because it was mostly finishing touches and colouring the logo but the important thing here is that after walking past the mat while letting it dry a great many times I came to the conclusion it wasn't dark enough. Taking a major risk because my stock of remover was quite low I just went in with a black and started darkening things. A risky move to be sure but it worked out, the image definitely needed to be darker since the light is coming from behind the characters. Really they should be in even more shadow than this but then you just end up with a bunch of black cut outs so you have to take some liberties with physics. 

11. I finish up the hands, start on the magic effects for the two casters and do some line work, I have also toned the black down a bit on Iron Man's armour since I had a gold colour I decided to use that instead. Between this and 12 I add the eyes, do some shading with a bunch of different colours to tie everything in, and add while highlights and Thor's hammer's lighting effects


Finally here is a scan of the mat, It's come up a bit darker than the real thing but between this and the image at the beginning you can get a good idea of how the real thing looks  as well as getting an idea of all the little details like the lightning on the hammer, the magic sparkles, or the fish scale effect on Captain Americas outfit (he's got stubble as well but its more subtle)..

And thats how I assembled the Avengers, well mostly, theres probably another article just about the sketches but we have run long enough for now. I still have a number of other mats to catch up with before we start looking at newer ones again so look out for one of those next week, probably one including other beings that like thunder and lightning. 

  

5 August 2013

Kakashi Custom Playmat

Once again it comes back to spirals it seems. I wasn't even aiming to use them in this image, it just formed as I sketched and re-sketched the first version.

Which as it happened was more than just a few times. I knew the pose I was aiming for but just couldn't get the angle of the face quite right, kakashi's mask hindering matters further as it obliterates most of the usual lower facial structure.   I ended up having to bring a large mirror into my workspace and work from live reference, which is probably why his hand is about life-size (although the rest of him is quite heavily foreshortened after that - you have to assume he's an arms length away from you).


I mention spirals a fair bit in these posts so I figured it was about time I talked a little more about them. There are a number of ways you can lay out an image, for example in photography and film especially the rule of thirds is quite useful to know in order to keep your subjects within the frame. Similarly and what I tend to gravitate towards is the use of the golden ratio, a spiral structure that tends to crop up quite a bit in nature, and which humans tend to find ascetically pleasing. 

You will however probably have noticed the image above doesn't quite match the golden ratio exactly but then I did mention that I wasn't really aiming for that layout in particular so its not a bad approximation, especially since the thumb pretty much rests at the center point. The other nice thing about using this method is you can stack many spirals inside one another all at different angles (mainly 90 degree variations) and all different sizes to build up a composition.

Another obvious thing I should probably mention is that the hands have changed between the sketch and the finished mat. The one in the foreground bothered me because the pose was going to be a right pain to make look right. The shading would have been all over the place, drawing the palm and the backs of the fingers in the same image can end up looking weird. The background hand wasn't at quite the right angle anyway, I knew that from messing about with the image digitally, so when it came time to work on the mat I just decided the ball of lightning would look cooler if the whole hand had just been engulfed. Theres still a bit of a hint of it being there, between that an an implied arm I let the viewers brain do the rest.

As for the lettering, the straight lines weren't much of a problem and I found a different type of tape which seems much better than what I had been using, the S on the other hand...

See, the colour I use for the black backgrounds likes having hard edges to work against or else it wont create hard lines and has a tendency to bleed. On the other hand I'm not going to get a curve with the tape I'm using. In the end i had to cut out a template, in two sections because of the size, and tape them down in the center while holding the edges in place, you cant really use any sort of tack on a mat since it would leave residue or interfere with the colours.

Inside the lettering as the background got progressively darker I worried it might have gone too dark. One of the things about the blues I use however is that they have a tendency to overwrite each other, even the lighter ones have enough pigment to draw over black, so if I wasn't happy with something i could always lighten it again. The finishing touch was adding a variety of other colours into the mix a bit like how space is dark but full of colour, you know, to add interest.

Well thats Naruto mat 3, I could probably spend several more paragraphs talking about how I spent a fair bit of time looking at all the different ways his hair gets rendered media, or all the little things I noticed about his jacket but I think thats enough for now. I do quite like using words as the framework of the layout though so I'm sure we will see this style again. 

Next time I finally 'assemble' a post about a mat I haven't been able to talk about for two months.