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.

Scryed Dragonball: Goku Vs kazuma Playmat

Ok so I know I implied the Lightsworn mat was the last of 2012 but sometimes a little misdirection is required. In this case because this mat was created as a Christmas present for my brother uploading it beforehand would have given the game away.

People often find buying gifts for others somewhat challenging, "they are difficult to buy for" they cry or "they already have everything,  could buy it for themselves!". I've always found this line of thinking somewhat odd if your buying gifts for people chances are you have spent some amount of time with them that year and as such sooner or later they will mention at least one thing they probably would like, often without realising it, you just have to be listening.

Maybe thats the real issue.

In any case when my brother mentioned that a Goku Vs kazuma playmat would be quite cool I immediately agreed and then set about subverting the whole concept the final result being bellow.

Combine the fact he plays quite a lot of wargames with the characters general predisposition to fighting and you get the idea. Still while this was always meant as a joke since drawing all those tiny models on a playmat would have been interesting to say the least the basic concept filed itself away for later use.

The final mat then and you will notice that while Goku is at his maximum level in both images kazuma is not. Comparing relative power levels between characters in different series is somewhat redundant, however, for the second design I decided that if they are going to fight you may as well have all involved at their maximum capacity, partly to add emphasis to the combat and partly to minimise debate as to who should win, because we all know how people like to debate such things.

The other major element with this mat was that I went a bit crazy with the use of the black, you have to imagine theres a light source above and slightly behind both characters mainly because I came to the conclusion that I didn't want to have a mat with some sort of landscape style background. With that in mind the elements of the image that were further from that source or obscured by other elements gradually became darker and darker and for a time I was concerned the style wouldnt look right on characters that are generally flat shaded though in the end I came to the conclusion it adds to the overall momentum of the image.

As for the background itself I went with the old Dragonball trick of using a patterned background to give the sense of movement. A technique generally used in animation to save time and funds so animators can get episodes done much more quickly, and used in Yugioh cards because...well I'm not to sure I would assume originally it was to make the characters stand out since the image frame is quite small and a proper background could potentially make it harder to see but more likely since many of the Japanese TCG's only tend to focus on the characters its probably a cultural thing. Back on topic, the dragonballs and Scryed necklace were added because I felt the background needed just a bit more detail than just some diagonal lines. It took me some time to decide on the colour of the stars eventually settling on the cartoons version.

The final touch and something I could only really trial on a mat that hadn't been requested for fear it's application would somehow cause the image to spontaneously react and melt away or some other nightmarish effect that could befall an image that I had spent countless hours on was to add pigments resistant to sunlight and that would generally provide another barrier against water and the substances that may be on a players hands and cards. My mats have been relatively water resistant for some time now, I don't advise testing it out on purpose though, but its nice to be able to add a further layer of protection.

And so in one fell swoop I now only have one major Jump series left to create a mat for, not that I have done a mat for the best Jump show yet but then I suspect there is little call for a Busou Renkin mat and  therefore would have to make it for myself if I ever wanted to make one.

Anime Yugioh Alters