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.

Vaporeon Friendship is Magic Custom Playmat: A Look at Depth of Feild

Today I'm going to look at the Vaporeon Friendship is Magic Playmat and talk a bit about something I seem to have managed to avoid having to use on most of mat mats, depth of field.

Field zero:

The mat came out of nowhere and initially I was slightly sceptical, what was I going to do with a set of instructions like these?

Main focus Vaporeon – Ok fair enough, I can do Pokemon mats.. Vaporeon
My Little Pony characters – Um, not where I was expecting this to go but ok.
Rainbows – I don’t think the weather conditions have ever been a requirement before.
Unicorns - ???
Pink, lots of it – I'm sensing a pattern here.
Its a present for someone under 10 – That explains a lot, ok so if it wasn’t obvious from the fact its a Pokemon mat lets keep things family friendly.

In my head I was drawing a blank, Vaporeon was there smiling at me but what were the ponies doing and how do you fit a load of rainbows in?

Rainbows, rainbows... well I can't just have them appearing for no reason so how do they appear in real life? Rain obviously, and waterfalls, well Vaporeon is a water type so... hot springs episode?

Ok lets do this.

Field one: 

We will start things off just after drawing the final design onto the mat. In terms of the colour scheme I'm initially thinking pastels so lets start lightly shading the areas that are definitely going to be in shadow.

I've been doing much research lastly and one of the things I noticed was that I seem to have gotten away with not having to do much in the way of depth in my mats, especially the older ones or those with patterned backgrounds. While it wasn’t one of their requirements I have added:

Attempt to create a sense of depth.

To the list of project requirements. I'm going to do about that in two major ways the first comes at the design stage and explains the pink grid over this image.

The first thing we need to work out is were the horizon is, for the sake of simplicity lets say its the red horizontal line at the center of the picture but it could be at any height, if it was one of the lower red lines the it would seem like we were looking down at the scene conversely the higher the horizon the more it will seem like we are looking up. I would say the real horizon in the image is about where the shortest line just above the central one is we are almost looking straight on but not quite.

Next you want to find the vanishing point. It will be somewhere on the horizon the point in the image where all the diagonal lines converge. In this example its dead center but the actual images vanishing point is up slightly and to the left.

With those two things figured out you go about filling the scene, if you want an object to be closer to the observer make it big say Vaporeon herself since she is the main subject. Need to make it look like something is distant make a bunch of them getting progressively smaller as they get nearer the vanishing point, there are three sizes of tree in this image the large foreground blue ones the medium mid-ground orange ones and all the tiny ones in the background. This is how we trick the brain into thinking the objects in the image exist at different distances when really its all just a bunch of lines.

Field Two:

It's not just scale the brain uses to work out distance it also relies on the intensity of the colours.

What would you say was closest to us in this image? The tree on the left and flowers on the right most likely. On the other hand the brain expects the stuff in the distance to be lighter more washed out or hazy.

Which is somewhat convenient for game developers when you think about it, imagine if they couldn’t get away with lowering the level of detail and texture quality as the distance from the player increased.

If your eyes are really good you might even notice that I'm halfway through colouring the image and have already drawn in everyones eyes. If I'm going to colour the image like this example though the pastel idea is somewhat out the window, but then I don’t really like leaving white space anyway.

Field Three:

Initially the blue trees all had quite stark white highlights but I'm gradually replacing them with light blues since the the closest objects should have the highest amount of colour in them anyway.

The trees aren’t just the foreground they also serve as a boarder one I have extended across the top of the image using a darker sky colour. The end goal being to give the impression of a tunnel or the sense your being draw inwards, we don’t want the eye escaping

Unconvinced by the blue of the sky it;s likely the next thing to be axed, well we do need more pink in the image after all. I've even managed to sneak a unicorn in, which may be surplus to requirements with two of the pony’s covering that base

The only thing that could sink this depth experiment at this point is twilight, she was fine in the sketch but no with the lake fully defined if I draw the water up to her chin its going to look like she’s at the same distance as the trees behind her, if I don’t I have to find something to so with her arms.

Finally for this section this may be a post about depth but that doesn’t mean there aren't spirals in this image, at least two major ones but I'll leave you to find them for yourselves.

Field Four:

Making the sky more dynamic had the added benefit of letting the mountains be slightly darker. Which in turn meant the waterfalls had to be filled in more, to be honest I think its better as it lets the white water around the rocks pop more, after that naturally the rainbows have to get brighter and one thing leads to another and you have a cascade of colour intensity upgrades radiating out across the image.

This has shrunk the space slightly, since the back of the image now seems smaller to us but I'll trade that for more detail and a more vibrant image since we didn’t lose the sense of depth,

The Twilight conundrum in the end was an easy fix I just added a rubber ring. Ok she might have a bit of an issue getting it off but it gives her something to be doing with her pose that the initial sketch didn’t have.

The finishing touch was to make sure Vaporeon didn’t end up looking evil, a concern that had raised its head after revealing the initial sketch. All early evee's have this issue its to do with the fact they don’t have whites of the eye. To avoid the issue I’ve increased the size of the eyes to give a sense of youth and also tried to blend in purples and greens to give them more depth. To really make sure I added massive highlights and flowers, perhaps all the pink was getting to me.

So I think thats about it for today, theres more to talk about but best to keep them for other posts, I think I met the goals I set out for this project, I definitely learner a lot along the way so hopefully going forward you will see more focus on depth.

Next time lightning strikes.

Until then it's more of a mauve.

Custom Tokens Anime Cats

While I don't play Yugioh currently I still try and keep up with the general goings on with the game. One of the big things at the moment is that the new banned list brought the number of scapegoats you can play up to max, perhaps I thought people would like goat tokens with a twist?. Combine this idea with the fact I had the materials available to create some i set about creating some myself, in todays post I will look at some of those tokens, talk a little about the thought processes behind the designs, and finish off with a brief look at one of the ways in which you can go about making tokens.

We will skip over the first two sets I created for the moment and move strait on to look at wave 3 because lets face it this is the internet and therefore all about cats. Or in this instance creatures that are at least in part cat, as much as a pair of cabbits/bunnycats, a cat thats a witch and Catbug can be at least.

By this point in the process I have also refined my technique, ironed out many of the problems that I encountered, and ditched the custom template I had spent quite some time on, since theres something to be said for nice clean designs that can be used not just as goats but as tokens in any game. 

I also wanted to try and make sure the tokens express at least a little of each of the series styles in their designs while still trying to maintain some sense of a group. 

A task made slightly more difficult with Ryo ohki since I had drawn the original image some time ago and the Bleach hat isn't exactly cannon. The carrot background helps quite a bit in that regard but it still feels as though it falls slightly outside the style of the other 3, possibly because the others use up more of the cards area.

I suppose the Kyubey token could be considered spoilers? On the other hand everyone should know that that particular bunnycat should not be trusted so perhaps its a public service. For this card I wanted to get a sense of the dual nature of what he's offering and the way the witches dimensions tend to be slightly surreal experiences. At the same time you have to be aware that too much detail can cause things to get muddled at this small size so I countered that by using large blocks and keeping the number of colours to a minimum.

Which leads nicely into the other element that I concentrated much of my focus on which was the selection of colours that I used, this was especially important for the blair token since Soul Eater has a very bold bright contrasting colour pallet. I was slightly sceptical of the colour of the pumpkins at first but with the purple background they really make the whole image pop. The basic shapes took some time to build up but the nice thing is once you have one of something you can always create more of it, there were still quite a number of squares to draw though.

Catbug's background by contrast was somewhat more straightforward to create, mostly since the series is likely created in a vector drawing program similar to the one I was using to create all these images. The variable line width black outline is more of a concession to my own persona taste since the show tends to keep its lines very narrow, if it uses them at all.  

Finally for today I will explain the first method people worked out to create foil tokens, its not really a very efficient method and can also be quite messy which is probably why most people have abandoned it but its probably still interesting to learn how people do it, or did it rather.

The first thing your going to need is a supply of raw materials the most important of which are a load of foil cards from the game of your choice. What set they are from actually makes quite a difference, some older MTG cards for example are easier to use than more modern cards, and Yugioh sets are all over the place with their ink quality and resistance to these methods.

After that you will need a way to remove the ink from the cards, you could use an ink eraser but thats hard work and expensive, your could even use glass paper as long as you were careful. Most people went for something a tad stronger and more effective which was another of this methods problems because the substance in question is acetone which isn't exactly pleasant stuff and should be avoided if possible both in terms of skin contact and the air flow of the environment you use it in. 

Which means at this point I add a disclaimer that I don't advise people use this method and do so at their own risk (Seriously its not worth the effort or cost of materials)

In any case you take a cloth add a dab of acetone and carefully rub off the ink on the cards. Even beyond the problems I have outlined thus far you then have to make sure the card doesn't start to get damaged from too much liquid being absorbed and at the same time find a way to prevent stray acetone from getting on any areas you don't want removed, most notably that reverse side.

You will then be left with cards much like those featured above with which you can do as you please.  From here you will want to spend some time on the computer drawing your tokens in your image program of choice you will then take that image and place enough of them to fill an A4 sheet of paper in another file. or perhaps you could paint directly on the card with some form of paint if you wanted.

Finally you will have to print out the images, cut them out, and stick them on the cards except instead of paper you will have printed the file out on some form of transparent material to allow the foil to show though.

You may also notice that your printer cant print white, needless to say this is another slight issue with this method.

From my tone you may have noticed I'm not a fan, still its important to teach people stuff, in that way there are more minds working on the problem and you get new techniques develop.

Next time I should have an actual playmat to look at so join me again then.