Cardfight Vanguard Custom Playmat. Dimensional Police Blueprint

 You get used to doing things a certain way. Sometimes things come along that force you to stop and look a little differently. Today we rotate 90 degrees to look at my first mat in a portrait aspect. 

Not so Brief.

Super robots are tall. Something of an understatement but accurate. The point is if you just want one on the mat your either going to end up with a lot of free space around it on a typical horizontal mat.

You could always cut the lower half off. make the top the focus and fill the mat with a flashy dynamic pose. No, not what your after?

Let me think about this then. Hmmm. How about doing the mat vertically? Bear with me you want the whole robot on the mat right, well he's pretty rectangular and mats are rectangular so if you turn one of the two 90 degrees both will match up right, you can fill the mat completely.

You want it to look like a blueprint? OK, even better, a skyscraper would be doe this way too right? I don't want something too static though, how about making it an exploded diagram? You know so we can see the inner workings. Yes? Cool.

Mass Production Type.

You want to know something else about Super Robots from card games? They tend to be low on reference material and/or high resolution images. finding reference got so bad I even watched the episode of the cartoon this guy shows up in and there were still parts of the body and more importantly aspects of the transformation mechanism I wold have to make up. It's a good thing I know my transformers.

As for the design itself there was a lot of revision. Getting the angles and perspective right took some time. it's exaggerated further in this image but the main way you make something look tall is to place the viewer close to the bottom of the page looking up. this has the effect of lengthening the legs and shortening the torso, a useful trick for both robots and humans. The bigness is further emphasized by placing a silhouette of a person in the image. as humans we know how big people are instinctively placing one beside the robot helps describe scale. other scale popular scale animals include birds and fish.

If the pose looks familiar I thought it would be cool to have a nod to a previous mat. Place them next to each other and they can have a pointing contest. not that Starcream would be happy about it.

The hardest part of the process though was that blank mats being as they are, blank, meant that in another twist from normal I was going to have to colour everything but the lines. Worse the bulk of the colouring would be limited to a single colour. I was just going to have to go vey carefully, it quite tricky to make something white again..

Near the end I added the boxes of darker blue to push certain areas back giving the image more depth. the leg on the right does stick out a bit but I wanted to make doubly sure. Plus it breaks up the large aeas of the same blue. Text and symbols were added to tie the mat as callbacks to the original card.

And Finally.

Something else I discoved while working on this project? its quite difficult to photograph a mat this way around without losing detail somewhere so apologies for that. It was a fun challenge, working with shape to create line is something I enjoy, the whole vetical thing though? Probably best saved for situations that really need it.

Next time, things stay this way up, but get rather a lot smaller.


Update  

I found the scan I made of the mat so heres a better angle

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.

Vanguard Moon Princess Playmat

Once again we jump back to last year to talk about a playmat. I'm almost out of mats from 2012  to discuss although its amusing to think at one point I was worried I wouldn't have enough things to talk about to keep things going. Then again if I'm being honest quantity has never been an issue for me, I can create content at an amazing rate when I have to, its the attention to detail side of things I have to keep on top of.

The particulars of this mat then, and today we have my first Cardfight Vanguard mat. if you don't count the paladin sketch, and also one of my earliest implementations of some of the new materials I've been blathering on about over the last few articles. The other big detail was the choice not to outline it in black as at the time I felt like that style was becoming a bit constraining and needed to test out a verity of other techniques. 

I've lernt quite a lot even in the short time since this mat was created and quite a bit of the stuff I'm doing now with light and shadow has its roots in the mats I created around this time. The elements are all here although the stark difference between the light and dark areas is further emphasised by the limited colour pallet and anime style while the vivid reds and yellows came out really well, even if you can only see their shininess in person. 

The background was also something of a risky move at the time, partly prompted by the fact I am constantly on the verge of running low on black and due to the nature of the way the mat material shifts liquids from place to place a serious disaster was narrowly averted as a wave of dark colour bore down on a hapless and unsuspecting yellow moon. Still, crisis averted and with a newfound respect for flow I proceeded to liven outer space up some more with a variety of reds, yellows, greens, and blues and threw in some of my trademark disappearing stars for good measure, again an effect that doesn't come across as very apparent on the scans and another reason I switched to posting photos (that and this particular scan has a number of issues with slightly warped angles).

My favorite element is probably the electricity on the sword/beak?/reflex cannon, like the starts its subtle and you don't see it from every angle but its just something extra that brings things to life. 

And hey look new logo, I should probably talk about that a bit but haven't decided if I want to do so here or over on Infinity Flawed which I set up to be a bit more freeform.