Majora's Mask Custom Playmst

This time I’m going to be looking at the various steps involved in taking the initial sketch of the Major’s Mask playmat from initial sketch to something that can be used as a basis for the final piece.

Phase 1. Sketch Up.

Most of the time I will go into a project with a series of small thumbnail sketches to work from. However occasionally its nice to just grab a sheet of A2 paper and start drawing this is a case of the latter. I had a strong idea of what the image should look like in my head so drew out the mat size guide lines at the top and bottom of the page and attempted to recreate that idea on the page.
All that considered the initial sketch turned out relatively strong, there are a number of issues I will discus shortly but on the whole not much changes between here and where the final piece ends up. At least, in terms of technique  things move significantly forward but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

The other thing that I think is worth noting is that this is the only version of the sketch that has shading. Its being used as a bit of a quick and dirty crutch, expressing shapes quickly without worrying to much about creating perfect lines. Having read any of my recent posts where I talk about using light and shadow to create shapes why then worry about how the lines look in the sketch? The main reason is that if I’m going to transfer the image to the mat having crisp perfect lines make things so much quicker, I can always ignore good lines when they are in place but muddy indistinct lines make things more time consuming in the long run.

Phase 2. Colour Check.

In general this is another step that I wont get to until later in the process but since I wasn’t creating this mat for anyone in particular I wanted to make the black and white image more readable and breaking it up with digitally with colour is a quick and easy way to do that. It also gives me a rough guide to how I might want to colour the final mat.
There are a number of colour choices that make it all the way through while others fall out of favor in the intival between this phase and the next. Meaning I put the design aside to concentrate on projects that were more pressing.

Phase 3. Long Time No Sketch.

Some time and much experience later I finally find some down time to do anything I want. Looking through my unused sketches this one deems the most interesting and so the first thing to do if I’m going to work on it is to redraw the initial image concentrating on the lines and fixing some of the more glaringly obvious flaws.
First up the moon isn’t exactly round in the original skect is it. Craters causing bumps aside that’s sort of an important thing to get right, as is the fact that the nose seems to be missing a nostril for some reason.

Next up while I want Clocktown to be slightly wonky and disturbing looking it would be nice if the clock tower was at least a little more symmetrical especially since the face of the clock itself  preferably needs to be round.

The mountains have also changed, I realized that having them pointing all over the place wasn’t helping the flow of the eyes around the image so now they bend either left or right depending on the side they are on.

Finally inspired by the way I’ve drawn the giant I want to go for a style thats a bit more inspired by the current generation of western cartoons so smooth curves and long limbs are the order of the day. Having fixed those things and now with an image whose lines are much more obvious there are still some things that need sorting.

At the end of the day this is just a copy of the original with slightly adjusted lines if anything the level of detail has actually decreased.

Phase 4. Up Detail.

It’s time to flip the image and find more errors our eyes hadn’t noticed before. The first things I notice are that the areas below the town and the size of the moon have to be adjusted. The face of the moon just always felt like it was too big for the size of the moon itself so that got a boost pushing it off the page slightly.

After changing the mountains the grassy area bellow the town just wasn’t working for me anymore so I adjusted it to follow the same curve as the moon. Now I found myself with an image thats made up of a series of concentric circles radiating out from the moon, not really what I was going for but you cant do golden spirals every mat i guess. While I’m undecided at this stage whether the town should be falling to pieces as the moon crashes down it’s clear having the mountains crumble adds a nice touch and helps connect the various circles.

The rest of the upgrade mainly involves adding detail and making as many lines as possible into  S’s (just look at the moon’s face for a good example, especially the nose). This is also the first point in time where Skull Kid’s feet get fixed they should never have been both facing the same way, on the downside I will now need to redraw his hands before I move to the mat because they have lost detail somehow.

Phase 5. On The Mat
The only major changes after phase 4 are that I add in a bunch of craters to the non face section of the moon to make it more interesting and a rather intense fire suddenly appears from nowhere to act as a way to make sure the two sides of the image are definitely connected and to guide the eye up and around the page (and yes maybe to add a spiral back in).

I chose blue for the moons colour scheme in the end since I seem to have coloured quite a number of yellow moons it was a nice change and I figured the darker shades would look more sinister.
Not that Link seems to care, perhaps he’s finally ok with his perpetual groundhog 72 hours.

Moon Princess Vanguard Custom Playmat Refresh

 

Final refresh for a while. I'm going to wrap this series up by taking a look at the moon princess mat.

When I made this mat originally I think what I was aiming for was an anime style flatness, bright colours, sharp shadows and highlights. Looking back at it now and it just feels like it could have done with greater sharpness, as if I didn't quite commit to making certain areas as bold as they probably could have been.

The main focus of this refresh then was going to be increasing the level of detail and sharpening the edges I was going to keep the colours relatively intact.

Then on a whim I decided to add a black shadow to the beads and things took a much darker turn.
 

And so, much like the other mats in this refresh series I ended up focusing on light and shadow. None of which were particularly consistent in the original, especially since there was a large round yellow light source behind her and it was having no effects on the lighting.

So I recoloured it orange.

That didn't look quite right either and I realised that both versions were having a weird effect on the way the figure in front of them stood out. You see the darker areas were fine, they had nice soild edges that worked well against the yellow, but the light areas had a nasty tendency to blend in. The opposite was also true when things transitioned to the black background, it was all a bit frustrating.
 

So I coloured the moon black.
 

That sorted the problems with the light areas (brought them up quite nicely in fact) but still left me with the problem of sorting the feathers on the black background.

At about the same time I decided the main light source would be above the princess (It's probably slightly in front of her too). this way I wouldn't have to mess around too much with the light on her hair and it also meant I would have more solid understanding of where shadows and highlights would need fixing, dont wing it is what I'm saying figure out your lights first.
 

With this all sorted I could get on and finesse the wings, adding a white line to the lower edge and generally chopping them about until they looked a little more like they were all about the same size.

I dyed her hair black which was interesting because then the outlines ended up being a light colour and that's not something that's really happened before and its an interesting effect that I might what to try elsewhere. I straightened the sword because even though the bulge in the original image is due to scanning it still want totally straight, changed the way the shield's mirror works and then realized something was still missing.
 

So I coloured the moon white.
 

Not an especially easy task but luckily the underlying layers still remembered they had originally been yellow, if they had been black to start with it would have been much more difficult.

Final touches were to tighten up all the line-work and the edges  then smooth out the transitions between colours. Somehow I had gone from cartoon shading to gradients almost without realising still I definitely think prefer it this new way especialy the way the princess seems to stand out more.

The last thing I considered was adding card zones, but then I thought 'for which game?' I'ts probably best to leave it as it is and let whoever may eventually want it decide if they want something specific.
 

Next time another moon, just a decidedly less friendly one.

Lightswprn Playmat Refresh Steps 1 to 5

Originally posted on my Facebook page over the course of a week this post collects all the text and images together into one place. I'm going to leave the text as it was written to maintain the feel of progression.


Monday

This week I'm going to be refreshing the Lightsworn playmat and I thought it would be interesting to show the progression from original image today to however it ends up turning out on Friday. As such each day there will be an image (or images) plus some text about whats going on or perhaps tips and techniques.

Best to start at the beginning though, so here a pic of the mat as it stands now.
There are a number of goals I have for this refresh and they are:

A: Find a way to push the background into the the background: While I like it, if this was a TV show both the foreground and background would be in the same focus which isnt ideal. What we really want is for the characters to be the main focus so we need to drop the background back a bit, either by lowering the detail or making it less sharp.

B: To remove as many tangents a possible: More on that in the days to come
C: Generally increase the level of detail: we might not want to go too crazy but lets see what happens.
That's it for today, assuming I don't mess it up somehow tune in tomorrow for the next stage of the process.


Tuesday

This week I'm refreshing the Lightsworn mat. Tune in every day to see how it's going.

So where are we at?

Well the first thing I did was give the background a light wash of grey. this knocked out some of the green, evened out the colours across the whole background and started to fade the lifework. However I then realized that all the characters are shades of white so a grey background might not get me much closer to completing goal A.

Next up was to try adding a glow around the characters, you may have noticed almost all Yugioh mats use this trick to separate the monsters from the backgrounds so I figured why not give to a go. Orange / Red were basically the only choices with the characters all being blue and white and the glows being green and it definitely makes them stand out but I'm clearly not quite there yet.

For Goal B I've already identified a number of areas that need adjustment (as seen in the red circles). Places were lines intersect causing the viewer to misinterpret what they are seeing or making it more difficult to read. For example the one in the bottom left, is that an ear or just another part of his robe? fixing these areas will help to make the individual monsters... well more individual.

Goal C is more of a gradual process, I've started increasing the shadows and highlights and noticed there are a number of areas that weren't quite finished. Why for example is there a large empty space under Lumina's arm? (It's possibly a crystal like the one below but doesn't really read as that) There were also one of two small areas of background that had detail but no colour , very odd.
Next time, find out what colour the background ends up.


Wednesday

This week I'm refreshing the Lightsworn mat. Tune in every day to see how its going.

Day 3 and its time to talk techniques.

First though you will have noticed the background is suddenly very red. In an effort to have the outlines match the background better I just decided it may as well be. I have used a gradient though and the heaviest layers of red are applied to the outer edges since I want to try and keep the glow in the center. Once again this has softened the linework, too many more layers and I might want to start adding it back but we will see.

What I mainly want to talk about though is how I've been going around adjusting lines the general idea being that if you have one side of an object that's very bumpy using straighter / smoother lines on the opposite side simplifies and makes things cleaner while not impacting the detail too much. In the lower images which show the beginnings of this the red lines represent parts that have been smoothed while the blue lines show... well the opposite. The green line shows were i have started work on smoothing out that side of the arm by strengthening the white highlight that separates the arm from the adjacent character but still have things to do like add the shadow to the adjacent character that should accompany that line.

Which is the other major thing. This time around like the other refresh mats I'm moving away from black lines defining edges and trying to go a bit more realistic. I'm not going to push it too hard on this one since I still want a slight cartoony look but we will see how it goes.
Having separated the characters from the background the next thing to do is spend a bit mote time separating them from each other, adding more detail and maybe starting on lighting effects but thats for next time.



Thursday

This week I'm refreshing the Lightsworn mat. Tune in every day to see how its going.

Thursday and I'm working my way around the image increasing the detail and fixing problems as I find them. Problems like the area inside the red circle in the lower right image where we have a number of monsters overlapping.

If you go back to a previous image you will see that the arm is behind the hat and the nose of the dragon intersects the arm. Neither of which is right since the dragon doesn't even need to overlap anything and the character wearing the hat is meant to be behind everyone else.
The dragon is an easy fix just shorten his snout and fill the space with the background colour but while I've moved the hat in behind by redrawing the arm slightly i have noticed while writing this post that it could still do with some slight adjustments to make it look a bit less like its connected to the yellow line next to it.

Its been the same sort of work across the whole mat, erasing or moving lines, sometimes just a nudge, others more extensive changes to fix the little things that I didn't see or wouldn't even have considered the first time around and we will see more messing with little details tomorrow, especially the faces..
The other major job before writing this post was to work on the edges of characters. If there was a light edge then I would make sure it was as light as it could be and that the area next to it on any object behind it was in shadow. Similarly if you have a dark edge then the area in the figure next to it will most likely be lighter. Doing this we start to move away for relying on the black outlines to define edges insted we are tying to use how light works.

I also noticed that the background was missing something. There are areas around the edges that felt a bit empty so I started adding in more green blobs. Since the blobs glow that led to bringing up the brightness of the lighting effects something i was going to have to get around to at some point anyway.

Tomorrow sees the final post and there's still quite a bit to be done, we will just have to wait see how it all turns out.


Friday

So this week I set about refreshing the Lightsworn mat. I thought it would be interesting to show the progression from the original image on Monday to the final changed piece today so lets see where we got to in terms of the goals I set out on Monday

Goal A :Push the background back: Well its much darker now and a great deal more even across the whole mat both of which help prevent it from drawing your eyes away from the focus of the image which is the characters.

Still it's nice I didn't lose the detail entirely I had thought I might have to overwrite the whole thing with black or something just to get rid of it but in the end I dulled it down just enough to stop it being so dominant and that was enough.

B: To remove as many tangents a possible: This was the most time consuming part of the process luckily I could combine it with goal C to move things around and increase the detail at the same time. There may have been a magnifying glass involved in this process just saying.
I think I managed to get most of them, all the glaringly obvious ones at least, some things I just couldn't alter because of how the image was initially drawn. If I was to draw it now I might take negative space into more consideration.

C: Generally increase the level of detail: Using light and shadow to show edges really allowed me to get more detail into charters that are quite small. Hair and faces have seen a big jump in detail for some of the figures not to mention all the gold banding has much more depth now..
Then there were things like Lumina getting a face lift because i was working on the image upside down and didn't really feel her original head was quite the right shape, her skirt got extensions for the same reason. Neither task was especially straightforward, funnily enough its much easier to add colour and lines than remove them.

Final Verdict: I achieved all that I set out to do mostly to the degree of success i was hopping for and in terms of all the extra detail possibly more so, I'm not sure these is where i though I would end up but the journey is part of the fun.

The final oal I set myself was to write a post everyday for one week, some of yu may have noticed however that the first three days posts were all written at once that's because while I wanted to have a post a day, the actual refresh didn't take a week sometimes you have to bend spacetime for a good story. Perhaps next time I'll live steam the process or something?

Next week, that's no moon, well it was until i refreshed it.

Kill La Kill Custom Playmat Refresh

 

Last week I wrote about how I had begun to wonder if I could re-colour some of my older mats. MY FIRST test subject was the Inzektors mat and since I liked how it turned out I immediately set to work on a second re-colour. Today I'm going to Discuss the Kill la Kill mat and some of the main ways I have upgraded it.

Lets start things off by looking back at the original version:

For some reason the first time around I went quite subtle with the colour scheme its all really carefully blended together and then somewhat ruined by my decision to add black outlines around everything. Its not even that they are poorly executed or anything its just that looking back at it now it seems a strange mix of styles.

The other strange thing I didn't really notice until after finishing the mat was that the contrast between the foreground and background probably wasn't high enough. What I was aiming for was to have the eye be able to focus on the fiber background, Japanese text, or the image within the text as separate objects. However if the differences between each section weren't strong enough things tended to run together and become difficult to read especially in busy areas like the section around the two main figures.

 Other than those two minor issues, both of which are based on an increases in knowledge and the passage of time, overall I quite liked this mat it has a neat concept and shows my first steps towards trying to use light and shadow as the main way of defining objects. That's not to say I cant make some improvements and I will be keeping these two points in mind as I go about re-colouring the image.

... 

 

The first thing I did was increase the colour intensity of the sky. I'm not sure why it just seemed to be a sensible place to start and wouldn't mess too much up if something did go wrong. In the original the really pale area starts quite low on the image that was fine but I'm looking to do a bit more with the sky this time so I start by pushing the darker colours up the page until there's only a sliver of the pale yellow left at the top. The other reason to darken the sky is because the first time around I had the situation where I had a pale colour on a character then a black outline then a pale sky which isnt ideal for making things easy to see. Making the sky darker means I can keep the edges of the characters relatively light.

The next thing to do was darken the fiber background. The first time around I couldn't get the black as dark as I would have liked so mixed in red and ended up with an interesting pastern but it still wasn't as dark as it really needed to be. This time I knew the best ways to make sure the black stays black and on top of that I'm making sure all the edges are as crisp as possible. 

The threads also get an upgrade. Any that are causing major tangent issues with other parts of the image are removed and the rest get a colour boost. Originally just red lines I also decided to up the detail to make them a bit more thread like.

Things get a bit more tricky from here since what I really want to do is move to a much more realistic style but those black lines are going to be hard to shift. Luckly because of the style I'm going for I'm going to need a dark edge on on side of each object followed closely by a light area so I can keep some of the lines as they are. There are two choices here either keep the lines on the right or the ones on the left and I decide on left since that way the light should look as if it is behind them which.is where it should be really since that's where the sky is.

Also at some point during this process I also decide to add a white line around the edges of the text. This is another way of making the various sections of the image more obvious.  

...

Finally lets talk about some of the changes to the smaller details in the image.

One of the biggest changes is in Gamagori's face. There was always this sense that something wasn't quite right and while making his chest much darker improved his overall look and helped make him look more loom'y (technical term) I wanted to make him look even more dangerous so changed his mouth. the blood is gone and now you can see his teath he's gone from looking slightly beaten up to something of a shark. 

This naturally lead to a slight change in head shape which made me realize that the angle of his hair was throwing off his pose slightly. Bringing down his hairline makes it appear we are looking at more of the top of his head and improves his menacing presence. 

I could have kept his eyes but in the end decided that since I had gone so dark I may as well match them up with the stars on his chest (who knows maybe one day I'll decide to add them back in). I also got rid of what might have been his ear, the gap between the two areas of the image has to be kept in mind when drawing the characters as it can cause the brain to make things up or draw conclusions you might not want it to and this was one of them that was throwing off how big his head should look.

...

When you look at the two images of the hand holding the sword you can see how the change from black outlines to shadows and highlights has taken an area that was reasonably well defined to start with and made the detail even more obvious. The best example being the red line on her arm is barely visible on the top image and in the lower one not only can you see it clearly but it also implies that its an object in its own right, a piece of material attached to the rest of her costume. Since I'm keeping the black lines on the right side of objects the left side of objects has to now have a corresponding light line and adding it here to the sword means I can imply the folds of the handle better which again adds to the sense that this thing is an actual object rather than just a picture of one.

...

I have mentioned before that there are certain scale restrictions on figures due to the materials I use. At the time these were probably the smallest charters I had even gotten onto a mat but looking back now they seem rather sketchy and undefined. 

The first thing that needs doing is deciding on an area that's going to be in shadow to make it easier to see them and the most obvious choice is the fancy gold braided thing on her shoulder since that should have been in shadow anyway the first time around but then is was going for making her appear a tad more ethereal. 

The way the dark area here in the lower image gives Gamagori's gauntlet a sharp edge with hints of battle damage is one of the clearest examples of how the two styles differ, if I was to try and do the same thing with black outlines it could look good but not necessarily as convincing to the human brain. Anyway with this area darkened we can lighten the figures making it much more obvious from a distance what they are.

...

I've actually made a few more adjustments to the image since writing this post, there was something just not quite right about the white line on the left side of Gamagori's arm which I couldn't figure out until I started doing this review and realized it was because it shouldn't be there at all - the highlight would have been on the blue area next to it not on the arm itself.

And thats the thing really, art is never totally finished, its just a case of putting down the brush at a certain point and them how long it is before you might pick it up again.

Until next time, our work is never over

Refreshing a Custom playmat : Inzektors

 

This mat might look familiar. Way back in the mists of time or 2012 to be exact I created this mat but it looked somewhat different. Today I'm going to look at the Inzektor mat and how it eneded up getting a shiny new look.

The original post for this mat along with a making of video can be found HERE.

 

There are a number of my mats that over the years for one reason or another I've ended up hanging on to. Mostly I've been using them as test subjects and while I'm pleased they have maintained their condition all this time occasionally I'll walk past them and wonder if I should be doing more with them. Well the other week I walked past and thought since they are test subjects why not have a go at seeing if it was possible to remake them in some fashion, to answer questions like how easy would it be to update a mat? What areas would be the most difficult to change?

For this first test I decided to keep it simple. Update the characters in a way more in line with my current style and change any areas I wasn't completely happy with the first time around. For these reasons I chose the Inzector mat since it's a relatively straightforward design with a number of areas I would quite like to improve. It's also the oldest in the group and didn't have the protective layer later mats have gotten so it should be easier to alter.

...

The first thing to do is clean the mat. It's been hanging in a high pedestrian traffic area for 3 years so I assume its probably picked up at least some dust. In the end I find its held up very well, the colours haven't faded, the pegs holding it to the hanger haven't caused any permanent depressions (in fact I don't even have to iron it) and when I start cleaning it I find there is very little dust buildup. I did come away from the process thinking that perhaps in the future I could improve things further by putting them in clear plastic bags and connecting the haners to that.

If your going to clean one of these early mats I advise getting a soft damp cloth and just giving them a light wipe over then letting them dry naturally, they shouldnt be to bothered by water but heavy rubbing may damage them.

 ...

Mat cleaned we can start on the refresh proper. The first thing I do in this instance is build a new lighting scheme. In the original there is left, right, and central lights but there's a bit of a lack of consistency on my part which makes reading that quite tricky so I'm going to cut the central one and rework where many of the shadows and highlights are to make things more ovious and the shading sharper. 

With a better Idea of where the light is coming from I can change from flat shaded with black outlines to a more realistic shading scheme where edges are defined by areas of light and darkness. Changing from one to the other does however throw up the first problem, the black lines are rather stubborn and in some cases almost imposible to get rid of fully we will see later how this also afects the design choices for the background.

One of the interesting things I discovered while working on this project was watching areas increase in detail. It was as if their clothes went from old school Standard Definition where creases were sort of implied but not really to modern High Definition where you could have seen the stitches, well if I drew them in I didn't go quite that far. I guess its a similar phenomenon to how the sketches go though phases of level of detail increases before becoming the final design, but you know, three to four years apart.

...

The next thing I wanted to do was get rid of the weapons in the background, no one uses those cards and they pull focus away from the characters. The thing was there's quite a lot of line work going on in them and I would rather not have to do the entire background black just to obliterate them.

Some experimentation later I found I could overwrite them with certain dark colours and then take the background back to light colours by applying them in vast quantity's over the top of the new dark patches. the downside is that It uses a lot of resources I was just going to have to get creative and think up some other solutions.

In the end I decided since I quite like the hex pattern in the background perhaps I could make more of that. We need to lose the oranges and yellows in the background anyway since we want to avoid using colours that are on the characters as much as possible so if we make the hex's smaller we can use a bunch of blues and greens and any really stubborn lines can be hidden in darker hexes.

I'm still left with some lines that don't stay in their hex's though so the circuit pattern from the original scheme comes back to do double duty, add some depth to the background and change peoples perception of what they are looking at.

No those arnt lines from a previous design they are circuits. Sometimes it beter to change somethings meaning rather than the thing itself.

...

In terms of use of colour in the background other than the dark hex's to cover things most are random except for the teal hex's at the top and bottom which are very much placed deliberately to squish the other hex's further back near the center of the image to create a feeling like they are in a round room with really odd wallpaper.

I also get to finally make it seem like they are standing on something rather than floating in the air which is not only a  big plus but gets rid of an aspect of the original that had been bugging me for a while.

...

I'm definitely much happier with the final peice after its facelift than I was before I think its a definite step in the right direction. With what I have lernt from this experiment I can start upgrading other mats confident that it is possible, although it does make me wonder if I still have the mat in another 3 years what will I think of it then?

Hopefully I can look back and think there's so much that can still be improved. Because we should always be striving to improve our skills and learn new things.

Until next time. recolour the past.

Custom Wurmcoil Tokens Haiku

 

Light and Dark in balance.
As coiling snakes like Life(link) and Death(touch).
Wurmcoil tokens painted as one.

Ugin and the Dragonlords Custom Playmat

Welcome back to another episode of attempting to fit large, flying, mythical creatures into a 12 by 24 inch space. Yes today we will be talking dragons (not literally becoming talking dragons – talking about them) as I look at the Ugin and the Dragonlords playmat.

Brief:

Get Ugin and the five Dragons of Tarkir Dragonlords onto a mat (thats clearly a band name which explains why the colour scheme ends up very similar to the Blue Eyes Ultimatemat), the planeswalkers Sorin, Elspeth, and Sarkhan should be riding Ugin.

Initial Thoughts:

Right off the bat there is an issue of scale. If we make the walkers the central focus then theres not much room left for the dragons, conversely with the dragons as the focus the walkers will be end up being quite small. Best to keep this in mind while working on the sketches.

Secondly if the walkers are riding Ugin what does that mean? Do we draw him in a typical dragon flight pose with them on his back? How will that affect his look since he's got more of a humanoid body layout?

Thirdly how the heck am I going to get all these wings on here and not end up obscuring more relevant details?

Sketching:

A great deal of time was spent drawing thumbnail sketches, trying out various layouts then narrowing down the list of options. Quite early on I discard the idea of having all the dragons flying along on some sort of sky background since then everyone ends up tiny to get everything in. Next out goes the idea if the walkers on Ugin's back, I don’t like focus and there are some odd angles. For some reason I get inspiration from those WW2 American recruitment posters Ugin Needs You! So now the walkers are going to have to sit on his shoulders. He only has two and we are trying to avoid the image being too symmetrical so one is slightly further away from us that doesnt leave much space for three large people. Well he's got a hand free theres an empty space in the lower right of the image that could work.

I'm finally getting a better sense of how I want these dragons personality’s to come across. Red / Black wants to be zooming along so lets try and get some sense of speed maybe a swooping motion. We have enough space available to have at least one pair of wings in full view, what do you mean she has two pairs?

Theres no way Blue / Black is going to be exerting much energy if he doesn’t have to, anywhere on the ground is fine.

They are dragons so there should probably be some breath attacks somewhere. Red / Green seems the best choice, fire and all that, also we want bulk and a sense of strength. Theres a large space in the bottom right free which means...

We need to balance out the image so the other bulky dragon has to go in the opposite top corner. Have a breath attack to mirror the other? Perhaps though Red / Blacks wings fill that role. Going to have to work the White / Green dragons pose around Ugin's pointing finger though, perhaps landing? Reminder to look up falconry.

Which leaves Blue / White. Keep it flowing. Inquisitive, what do Planeswalkers taste like?

Final layout.

I'm going for something slightly different this time since the wings and breath attack form a useful box that draws your eye around the image BLACK. I mean there are still going to be spirals in it, duh, but they aren't whats holding the layout together the RED lines show a number of them but there are vortices all over the image.

Ugin needs enough image space to have room for not only his own great bulk but for walkers to hang on. I decide to draw him being released from his cocoon since it means I wont have to draw his legs. One of the weird things about Ugin, and Bolas is that they have been depicted in art at a variety of scales from slightly larger than human to towering monstrosities. If I'm going to fit the Planeswalker's on him then Ugin's going to have to be closer to the later and if thats the case we can making him look bigger by placing our viewer lower in the image, as if we are looking up at him, BLUE. Since Ugin is also the main focus of the image we are going to have him as central as possible.

Hey look the GREEN lines show us everyone more or less fits within the rule of thirds its almost like I planed it that way. We are also trying to keep the dragons away from the page edges, its not entirely been possible since there are arms and wings going everywhere but for the most part their bodies don’t touch the edges.

Walking Through The Air.

I scan the mats into the computer to do most of these blog posts. As you can imagine an A4 scanner isn’t as large as a mat so it involves combining six separate scans into a cohesive whole. It also has the side effect of showing up the mats underlying fabric structure which while interesting in its own right does slightly distract from other details. The trade off of course is that if I just photographed the mats I may not get all the details in the first place. I think in the end it comes down to what your trying to show and for me and this post it apparently means beards and fly away hair.

In the above image we zoom right in to look at the details on the walkers, keep in mind these are really tiny details, in the face boxouts we are looking at areas somewhere in the region of 1cm square so theres not a lot of room. The main goal then is not to try and add as much detail as possible but to draw something that implies what you want it to when viewed at from a more natural distance.

Lets take Sorin's head as an example. It's a blue square with a dark line that may imply cheekbones, a 'L' shape that may be where the edge of the nose is, two dark ovals and a slightly lighter splodge where the eyes are expected, and a thin line that could be construed as a mouth. Its not really a head its a series of marks but because of the way our brains lie to us thats what we interpret it as. As an aside its always amusing to see who Facebook thinks characters you have drawn are, its sort of nice as an artist to know a computer at least thinks these marks on the page are vaguely human shaped.

The box next to that is interesting also since it shows how the fabric doesn’t always scan the same in each section. Putting the whole image together tends to be easier if you scan each section the same way up.

Whilst these areas are very small you can still use light and dark to try and recreate certain effects. If we draw little '>''s in a darker colour on Elspeth's armour it gives the impression of scale mail. On the other hand the little black bump on the side of Sarkhan's hand is probably just a tiny bit more detail than we actually need, its meant to be his thumb but we could probably expressed 'hand'-ness without it. Its all about striking a balance, make sure to move between working close up and looking at you image from a distance.

Finally since they are riding a large once godlike dragon lets mess their hair up a bit to give more of a sense of movement. Elspeth may or may not also be slightly concerned about her armour melting. As she should, we are dealing with 'Ugin and the Dragonlords' they know how to turn it up to 11.

Until next time... I want to make a rock the dragon pun but the Dragonball mat was a few posts ago.

Morpheus Ponder MTG Alter

I've been noticing that my posts have been getting quite long lately and perhaps its time to start mixing in some shorter ones. I've also got a number of alters and tokens I need to talk about so lets merge two birds into one stone and start a series of short articles about small cardboard art, lets say no more than 500 words and to be generally released at the end of the week since mats tend to be at the beginning.

What started this chain of thought was doing my first magic alter in a while, the scene in the Matrix Morpheus offers Neo a choice, see what they did there?

As it turns out practicing in one medium helps in others, the whole image is an exercise of building shapes from light and shadow something you may have noticed me talking about more in recent posts.

There was much use of a magnifying glass. One of the hardest parts was choosing how much detail was too much, its only a small area the extra resolution you get with the glass skews how its going to be mostly seen from a distance, to much detail and it starts to get difficult to 'read'.

Morpheus’s head is a good example: At one point his brow had wrinkles in it, made sense through the glass but they just didn't look right from a distance.

The real tricky part was the chair, the light and shadow areas have to be right to give the appearance of lumps and on top of that the highlights have to be super sharp to give that glossy leather look.

Figured out a new way of getting the design on to the card though, definitely improves the detail.

Its surprising how long something like this can take considering the size, its handy to have something else to do while a layer of paint is drying so you not tempted to add more

Fun though, I'd like to see what I could do with a full art alter at some point

Until next time Keep it. relatively. short and sweet.

Super Sonic, DBZ, Bleach Custom Playmat (Or) Striking a Pose

So you want your image to have some dynamism, the characters to show a bit of movement, something that will be a more interesting than having them face forward and stare out of the image at you. Well today we are going to go though a number of ways I go about trying to achieve that while looking at the Super Sonic mat.

Lets start with Ichigo. The brief called for him to be wearing his final outfit so I need to go away and look at what that outfit actually looks like. After making sure I'm looking at the right one and noting things like the way X's are worked into the design and how the under layer interacts with the top black layer I alsoI notice his sword is quite large so I'm going to have to keep that in mind if I want to get it all on the mat.

So now I know what Ichigo looks like the next thing I need to check is how do people hold swords? its all very well to look at the character your trying to depict but its best to check whats really possible especially if your working with a cartoon character. 

The first technique to improving your characters poses involves running an image search to bring up as many sword poses as possible, depending on the type of sword your tying to depict the search terms might require some finessing but there should be plenty of reference images out there. Take as much information in as possible then start drawing basic figures, stick people will do, just quickly trying out a variety of poses to get a better feel for them.

I've already found poses for Goku and Sonic that I'm reasonably happy with but Ichigo is proving more troublesome. Not because I designed them first or each character separately, everything was done on one sheet together all at once, but because sometimes you find an element or elements that just refuse to come together the way the rest of the image has.

If I'm going to stick to this design he's going to have to fit in the space that is left which in this instance is an L shape.

I draw him charging forward, his head near the bottom of the image, fine but now there's a huge gap at the the top of the page. Next I draw him sword ready to impale the others but now the whole mat is mostly taken up by weapon and Ichigos arms are off the edge. I work though pose after pose trying to find the one that works best but its still not coming together. 

One more quick look though the references I've gathered and I get the idea to flip the image, this gives more more options since now Ichigo's main hand isn't constantly getting in the way of other elements or generally causing me problems but I'm starting to think I need to try something else.

Part 2: In Which You Have To Be Fine Looking Slightly Silly.

I find a toy sword, a large mirror and start looking for poses that might both fit the space I have available and look cool and dynamic. The hard part is that the mirror isn't in the same space I work in and holding a camera and a two handed sword is a rather tricky logistics problem.

What I'm alluding to is this: don't underestimate the usefulness of props when your drawing and don't be afraid to look silly. The internet might give you a general concept but you wouldn't paint a still life without having placed it in front of you or done life drawing without s model so why would you try do any other painting just from memory? Doing the poses yourself also means you can get exactly what your looking for. Here for example after many silly samurai poses I've found a way of positioning Ichigo that fills the space practically perfectly.

Don't have a full length mirror, selfie stick or friend you can talk into posing? All is not lost! It's time to bring out the toys, i mean collectable action figures…

Unit Zero Struts his stuff.

Those little wooden guys you see in art shops are fine and all if you want a blank human-ish form to work from but I find that since they don't stand up naturally, being as they are usually suspended in the air by a metal pole in the back, sometimes its easier to use action figures since they're usually free standing. There are a wide variety of models you could use but the ones I tend to stick with I use because of their range of motion and the way their joints work.

Admittedly if your drawing people robot suits may not be the best choice for accurate limb lengths but this is just an example and Unit Zero here doesn't get out much. We will be using him to get a feel for how foreshortening is going to affect the size of each body part as we move further away from the observer. He's not exactly got the same proportions as Sonic so matching that pose is tricky, especially with massive shoulders, but its not like physics and the way our eyes work is going to be diffrent between them.

Got enough toys, I mean miniature non-living life models, why not set up the whole scene.  Or how about building it all in clay, card or whatever else you have on hand, I watched a program once where they explained how a landscape artist painted said landscapes based on models he built out of things he found around the garden with vegetable trees and the like,

What this all boils down to is that it's much easier to draw something thats in front of you than to have to make everything up from memory. The old masters used to use camera obscures and other clever tools and techniques to accurately transfer a persons appearance to a canvas, admittedly they didn't have distractions like the internet back then either so spent a great deal of time practising too but that's the point I'll be making in a moment the point right now is your brain has a nasty habit of asuming things or downright making stuff up, trust your eyes not what you think you may have seen.

Getting back to the mat. I've drawn Goku before, most notably here in the Scryed mat, having had some prior practice meant I could get his pose relatively easily. It did take a number of passes to figure out how his hair should fall weighing up the factors of anime logic vs wind resistance, gravity, and how the viewers brain thinks things should look. 

We want him to be showing effort, powering up or just about to launch into an attack, a large part of this is going to come from the face so naturally another technique has us spending time making funny faces in a mirror but hey that's what animators at places like Disney do so lets not worry about the people looking at us slightly concerned.

Sonic's pose was even simpler, I used to draw so many of my characters with one leg behind the other way back in the mists of time, Ie like 10+ years ago, you probably could've called it my art style. The tricky bit was getting the foreshortening right and we have Unit Zero to help us there. Sonic's pose is a bit more linear than the others but we are hoping to add some dynamism to it though the slight twist of the body and the way he is reaching forward out of the image.

And Ichigo? Well in the end  I found that holding the sword like that kept it from covering all the other characters. The L shape I have to fit him in means he has ended up attempting to kick Goku, perhaps we could really have done with slightly more mat just to show where the legs are headed a bit more clearly but the upper body always takes precedence when working at this size. Finally while you cant always replicate how the character looks, I wasnt going to be modeling the outfit for example, we still want things to be realistic from experience we know the long fabric of his upper clothes will move in the opposite direction to the one in which he is traveling. 

And all getting the pose right took were a whole nunch of pictures of us posing we will save in a folder for possible later use, just hopefully not by others against us. 

Part 3: In Which I Talk About The Things That Aren't Pose Related But In A Way Are.

The backgroud blends elements from all three charcters respective worlds. Primarily Green Hill zone with king kai's planet and The castle from the ghost city in Bleach. The trick was to make something interesting that wouldn't distract from the rest of the image.  The zone dips in the middle primarily to create a triangular negative space above it that's meant to draw your eyes down from the top corners.

In terms fo the lighting I went really heavy on the highlights this time around. In part due to the fact I didn't just want Ichigo to be a large area of flat black. This led to almost everything including the grass having a line of light running though it and a more realistic rendering of the characters than their typical anime style.

Which brings us to my final point: That above all else, the posing, the setting up scene with models, and all the research, the most important thing is to keep drawing people lots and lots of people, exemplified here by an image showing how the characters looked in two mats from some time ago and how they look now.

Look at the Goku at the top of the image. His pose is very vertically aligned. the line at the center of his chest makes this really obvious. Where as the Goku on on the Sonic mat is built around a S curve that takes that line curves it though the neck and into the left edge of the face. The Ichigo in the top image has a more dynamic pose than the top Goku but could do with one or two tweaks, looking back at him now it sort of feels like his body isn't quite connected up the way it should be, obviously my understanding of anatomy wasn't quite as good back then.

Yes in the end the reality is you gotta just keep drawing stuff, want better poses, draw stuff, more detail, draw stuff, and so on and so forth, it obviously works that last image proves it.

And on that sobering thought thats all I have time for today, next time, Um let me think about that.