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.

The Brotherhood Custom Playmat (Or) Time Management

Welcome to the 100 post, there was cake but we ate it all. 

I could have used this post as a retrospective but we already have three of those Here, Here, and Here, so instead today I'm going to talk about another aspect of entropy, time management. I'm going to continue where we started last time by discussing another instance of multiple copy's of the same mat, in this case the three Brotherhood mats and how I went about making them within tight time limts.


Part Alpha: All the time in the world.

It usually takes me two weeks on average to create a mat especially the more complex designs. A great deal of that time is invested in research and sketching. This discovery phase is then followed by a phase devoted to upgrading the level of detail and generally polishing what will end up as the final one to one scale sketch. Lets say this combined section takes up a third of our production time how do we compress these phases if we are on a tight deadline?

The first option is to get become a better artist, we are on post 100 and there is a definite evolution from the posts at the beginning. Things that would have taken significant time before are now straightforward, ways of working I wouldn't have though of back then have increased productivity, you do anything enough times your going to get better at it just keep practicing.

Have resources already available. I keep just about everything related to each project it all gets filed away just in case I do need it for whatever reason. In the case of the third Brotherhood mat this saved quite a bit of time since I didn't have to go back and recreate content meaning I could just get on and start almost immediately on the real mat. 

Work smarter not harder. This one I find slightly more tricky. Know what your goals are and only do what needs to be done. The best example I can give of this is art coursework - Art being a subjective subject the only way you can be marked fairly against others is if you all have to cover the same points. You could make the most amazing piece of art in the world but if you don't cover, forget, or ignore the requirements laid out in the documentation you could end up scoring lower than someone who puts in very little effort but covers all the bases.

In the case of the first pair of brotherhood mats I had two to three days to get them both done and posted knowing the design brief consisted of the words The Brotherhood on a blue background, and that I had a free reign on the pattern, the quickest and most detailed way to create the design was to do it digitally, the text will be sharper we can play with all the filters and any amendments based on feedback can be made quickly. 

Part Beta: No time like the present.

Having spent a third of our time designing, or in the case of these mats having cut that time right down to something closer to a twelfth or zero for the green one, we now move onto the actual mat phase. This will include applying the design to the material, coloring and line work possibly not all in that order. 

If you don't have a good grasp on your schedule you can end up rushing this phase or at least parts of elements of it. the major time sink is that you have to work up from the light colours to the dark ones and if you rush you can end up losing the lightest areas. the time investment in this phase also depends on the syle your going for, realistic lighting is going to take longer and require more steps than flat shading, detailed line work done at the beginning may need some time allotted to fix up at the end.

When your doing multiple mats all this stuff increases exponentially. One of the reasons for the production line method outlined last time is that its actually quicker than finishing each separately since you always have the colours you need at hand and have to swap back and forth less.

Still, doing the first two mats I found that there was an awfully large area to cover and not a lot of time to do so which sent me down the path of using my secondary medium more than my primary. which was fine because it does cover more quickly but the time you have to leave between applications for it to dry adds up and if I hadn't had two to do, one drying while I work on the other, then it would have worked out slower in the end.

for the third mat I stuck to my primary mostly for that reason and partly since I had quite a lot of green spare and could let it flow without worrying to much about running out. 

It definitely felt like the green mat was progressing faster than the original pair. Even with the tighter deadline, this time a day and a half, I found all I have learned in the intervening time speeding me along. 

The next question was, was it going to dry in time?


Part Gamma: Back to the Future.

On the plus side its not going to take as long as the first pair but we still have to dry the white tendrils and stars. this process can be sped up by using an iron it also helpfully locks in colour and evaporates any excess. This is the final phase of the process and can take anywhere from a few hours to a week, depending on how violent your feeling with the iron, so make sure you plan accordingly. 

This phase is finished with a quick application of protective spray, which again is left to dry, and then its all down to the postman or your own legs depending on the distance.

Taking all this into consideration we have these phases:  
Discovery -> Polishing -> Application -> Colouring -> Final Clean up.

Knowing the projects workflow means we can plan for the time available, cut detail to save time, add a month to discovery to spend in a library researching, spend two weeks painstakingly coloring chameleon scales, or whatever. In the end timescale is just as big a player in the design brief as any other detail, especially when you have to slot projects in next to or around each other and the rest of your life.

What it boils down to is weather or not you can accurately tell how long something is going to take, that's a very useful skill to have. 


Part Epsilon: Like Clockwork.

I'll finish this post with a brief look at the actual design of the mat. 

Much like the Without a Doubt mats the idea its to get them looking as close to the digital version as possible. we also need to make sure the text is as centered as possible so measure measure measure. For the blue pair I could apply thin layers working from the outside in to build up a gradient I also used far too much black grey and blue and could have saved time by removing the grey layer entirely. For the green mat not having to do the initial design again meant I could spend more time pushing the definition up, the fact I was sticking mainly to my primary medium also led to sharper lines. 

One of the main goals of the blue pair was to make them align when placed opposite each other. this is tricky since the 'zones' design runs diagonally and will be flipped when turned around. In the end I added a second set in the background for the other mat to line up their foreground with which gave the design a little more depth. 

The green mat is much the same design wise, as it would be, however there are a number of minor tweaks and improvements to the design many of which strangely came about due to having access to a T Square and drawing board. The plus side of working with the greens is they don't overwrite each other like the blues do on the other hand I couldn't go quite as dark so added some line work to the text.

Well that's been a relatively standard post all things considered. There was going to be fireworks but rain stopped play, just one of those things you can't plan for I suppose. 

And thats all the time was have for this week, until next time I'll leave you with a reminder that there was a very good reason everyone thought Scotty from Star Trek was a miracle worker.