MLP Rarity Custom Playmat

The one thing I said I wouldn't do right at the beginning of all this was to make black and white mats. At the time I perceived it as a way to set myself apart from everyone else, a commitment to always do full colour.

So what do you do when someone asks if ou can just do the lines for them because they want to colour it themselves?

Like they say, rules are meant to be broken, and sometimes doing the thing you said you wouldn't can improve then things you said you would. 

I'll be going into more detail about that next time. Today since the opportunity present its itself I'm going to go over the basics of working with lines, mostly simple steps you can take to make an image more dynamic, like last time the majority of this post will be explained through images.

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Funny how discussing lines has led to a lack of colour in this post.

 

As an aside you may wonder why I went with this style over the previous one. There are two reasons. The first being that as a mat based on cartoon horses I'm aiming for a certain flatness from the style and secondly while the light source as I imagine it is in the background dead center thats not necessarily how the person coloring it is going to perceive things.

Also the vanishing point is somewhere way off the page to get the diamonds to look right so there's that.

At the office once we were set against one another to imitate someone who was no longer there's style. No one won, we pick up quirks as we steal techniques and work towards our own style you can get close but I guess to an art director the differences are glaring.

The fact I was a programmer at the time  probably didn't help my chances.

0.05's are actually thinner than the mat material threads or near enough, you have to be careful because the texture is going to throw the neat lines your trying to draw off.

next time we move from the basics to how being forced to take the path untraveled helped with the next mat. No more horses for now, no next time its all about coloring frogs.

Until then, I wonder how all these images affect google hits.