Refreshing a Custom Playmat: Persona 3 Nyx Mat

Chances to upgrade a piece of art don’t come along that often. After all by the time anyone gets around to even thinking about it your probably several hundred years dead. On the other hand Playmats are art that has to withstand the rigors of constant use, occasionally they may require a bit of a spruce up. Thats going to be the topic of today's post as we take a look at what was involved in refreshing the Persona 3 Nyx mat..

Four years in the breaking

It's been a while Persona 3 Nyx mat, how've ya been? Bearing in mind I had no idea about sealing mats at the time I think it's done well for 4 years of use. What we are seeing is that the colours have faded slightly and there is understandable wear around the edges, both from use and living loose in a bag.

A tiny bit the worse for wear but overal you've done well soldier

It's the black thats faded the most. Which is interesting since usually its the paler colours that are the first to go, must have been something to do with the fact I was using two different mediums. That aside the most striking change is the loss of that vibrant neon.

Here's a little secret though. This image, the contrast has been pushed up to make the blacks darker and the image easier to read, the original was never quite this dark in the first place. Why push the contrast so much? Well you see at the time I didn’t exactly have all that decent a camera and it helps to offset the low resolution. That said with this refresh I'm hoping to get the mat up to this level of colour at the very least. Think of it as finally matching the original vision. First though we need to know why the mat looks as it does not after four years.

Why do things fade? Well there are two main reasons.

Reason one: Wear.

Want to see what a mat looks like without its backing? Any mat thats is, even the printed type? Heres a pic.

Best not to ask why I have the fabric of a mat and not the rubber under-layer. There was an experiment...

Yup its essentially just a bit of fabric, not a particularity thick piece of fabric either and yet one that has to withstand all the card flicks, elbows, greasy fingers, and rubbing from other objects in a bag that occur during a mat's life. It would be like if you only had one tshirt, You wear it wash it then put it on again, over and over for four years. What happens to any images on it or the seams and edges?

Thats right Wear, Luckily unlike clothes the rubber backing of a mat keeps it from falling apart we still have to deal with wear to the image though.

Reason rwo: light.

The sun is trying to kill the colours.

Over time light breaks down the pigments, less tiny pigment particles less colour on the human eyes scale. This is more like a river carrying away the individual particles ,with less of them left behind its impossible to be as bright as before the river appeared.

On the plus side unless you leave your mat on a windowsill while your not using it light is less of an issue. Also gaming stores aren’t renowned for their sunroofs.

On this mat what we are seeing is mainly a wear issue. I can feel the fabric isn’t as thick as it used to be and there are more frayed fibres around the edges. One of the things we will be looking to do near the end of the process is to bulk the mat back up a bit.

Beyond that it's a straight re-colour.

Well it would be but I've come a long way in four years, I think we can do better than that.

The reunification.

In this image I'm about halfway done with the refresh.

There are a number of things that still need fixing.

You can already see things have begun to tighten up. If I was to draw a graph showing level of detail over time there would definitely be an upward trend, I guess thats what you get with practice.

I've been removing as many Tangents as I could find, we've covered this before but to recap. Tangents are where lines meet and form shapes they shouldn’t and in doing so they confuse the viewers eye. In this image for example the way the bow, spear, and Nyx's dress interact caused some confusion originally, at least I wasn’t happy with it at least. Theres still a bit to do to work them apart but you can see the beginnings of the refinement of each object and my atempt to move them apart..

Another thing we can do to improve readability is make sure that dark edges are followed by light areas and vice versa. There are a lot of very small details on this mat, for example the gold spikes, and we can increase the crispness of their edges without putting a black line around them if we use this technique. I've also changed the lighting, on the original I use a grey to shape the black clothes of the characters but if the moon is the primary light source then doing so leads to confusion, where is the light coming from to make their backs lighter than their sides? Just fixing this makes the figures feel much more a part of the rest of the image.

Finally I've begun darkening the edges of the image in order to create an oval of darker colour. This pool into witch we are drawn should help to keep the viewers eyes within the bounds of the image where before with all the figures at the edges it could be quite easy for the eye to wander out.

At this point I'm not sure if I want to outline the everything or not.

0.3 to 0.8

I've outlined the everything.

I'm not sure which I prefer this or the top image.

Had to in a way. Ceaser is all grey, at some point near the edge of a surface your going to need to go darker to create the outline and once you've done that then you start thinking 'well lets just see what the guy next to him would look like' and it's all a bit of a snowball from there.

What I didn’t want to do however were boring lines that were all the same width, you know like I did the first time around because I didn’t have four years more experience. So keeping the Rarity mat in mind I set about outlining everything, making sure to vary the pressure of my stroke. To make doubly sure I went back and added even more thickness to certain areas I wanted it to be really obvious. Then I got an even thicker brush and drew big black lines around the characters.

But that was too much so I undid most of it.

I'm glad I did add the line-work in the end, not only does it make those areas that had lines originally more dynamic but it really helps to make the character pop.

I've been talking about techniques to sharpen the image for a bit now so I guess it's past time to mention colour.

Colour me unsurprised.

In the original image the sky is something of a teal, one I no longer have access to. This turns out to be less of a problem than it seems since the moon is green after all and as I boost it back up to its neon glory I'm naturally drawn to blending out from there using greens rather than teals anyway.

I want to bring more of the blue from the dress into the left of the image as the right is a bit heavy with it so start to tint the greys with a blue shadow. Th blue Itself has held up well over the years, theres no real surprise there its what blue does. Still I want to add in some dynamism so work the dress up to a darker shade and blend out to create folds in the fabric

In the same way I want more blue on the left, the areas that were red and orange before are all now shades of one colour to draw your eye from left to right. There's a nice curve there I think it should be used. Equally the yellows are better matched now, I really wanted to cut down a bit on the number of colours involved, less can be more after all and if it helps strengthen the overall image all the better.

I debated weather or not to add purple clouds. It would have had a nice contrast to the green but theres no taking that back, the sky isn’t really the focus anyway so had I not liked it I would have been stuck with at best very dark green clouds.

Just to add to the eeriness factor I've left Nyx's face without shadows, clearly she can self illuminate somehow – perhaps she is a nightlight. I also altered the smile and reshaped the head. It wasn’t that far off before but you should have been able to see more hair on the right and now she looks like she's enjoying herself more.

Deepen the blacks on Nyx. For obvious reasons we do the black last (hint we don’t want to be trying to put yellow over it) lets also sort out the boot on the right not sure what went wrong there but its not the same size as the one one the left even if you cant see most of it. I could go darker with the wings but as we have learned we want things in the background to not be as bright/strong.

Bring in some green shadows and highlights to tie the figures and the sky together and we are done. Not quite the same style as before but possibly closer to the original anime intent overall, especially on the humans.

Next up lets do something to keep this mat going for even longer than four years.

CFC Free.

With the colouring done its tim for detailing.

Not as in adding detail, more the polishing a car up to make it look as good as it can.

Here that involves:

Trimming any glaringly obvious frays: Being fabric we don’t want to go to crazy it might un-knot.

Painting the sides of the edges of the mat: if it's green at the edge we don’t want to see white over the lip.

And adding an undefined number of layers of sealant.

This last point involves a spray so you will want to do this outside in calm dry weather. Here I've gone with a mat sealant, mat as in not gloss rather than specifically for mat's. As I mentioned earlier I want to improve the mat's thickness so it takes a fair few coats to bring it up to where I am happy with it. Adding the sealant helps for three reasons. First it locks in the colours, second it takes the wear before the mat itself and third a decent sealing product will have some form of UV protection or be lightfast in some way.

Basically it helps slow the process of ageing.

For art that is, I advising against any attempts to use it in any other way.

Once this is dry your done and ready to once again take to the battlegrounds.

...

I just wish I had a blacklight, see one of the ways I got the brightness back up was to use glow in UV colours. It woulds be nice to know if the sealing process turned them off or not.

Obviously thats a story for another time, until then remember art isn’t ever a finished thing theres always room for a refresh.

Although I'm not sure how I would feel about someone else messing with my art 100 years form now.

Majora's Mask Custom Playmst

This time I’m going to be looking at the various steps involved in taking the initial sketch of the Major’s Mask playmat from initial sketch to something that can be used as a basis for the final piece.

Phase 1. Sketch Up.

Most of the time I will go into a project with a series of small thumbnail sketches to work from. However occasionally its nice to just grab a sheet of A2 paper and start drawing this is a case of the latter. I had a strong idea of what the image should look like in my head so drew out the mat size guide lines at the top and bottom of the page and attempted to recreate that idea on the page.
All that considered the initial sketch turned out relatively strong, there are a number of issues I will discus shortly but on the whole not much changes between here and where the final piece ends up. At least, in terms of technique  things move significantly forward but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

The other thing that I think is worth noting is that this is the only version of the sketch that has shading. Its being used as a bit of a quick and dirty crutch, expressing shapes quickly without worrying to much about creating perfect lines. Having read any of my recent posts where I talk about using light and shadow to create shapes why then worry about how the lines look in the sketch? The main reason is that if I’m going to transfer the image to the mat having crisp perfect lines make things so much quicker, I can always ignore good lines when they are in place but muddy indistinct lines make things more time consuming in the long run.

Phase 2. Colour Check.

In general this is another step that I wont get to until later in the process but since I wasn’t creating this mat for anyone in particular I wanted to make the black and white image more readable and breaking it up with digitally with colour is a quick and easy way to do that. It also gives me a rough guide to how I might want to colour the final mat.
There are a number of colour choices that make it all the way through while others fall out of favor in the intival between this phase and the next. Meaning I put the design aside to concentrate on projects that were more pressing.

Phase 3. Long Time No Sketch.

Some time and much experience later I finally find some down time to do anything I want. Looking through my unused sketches this one deems the most interesting and so the first thing to do if I’m going to work on it is to redraw the initial image concentrating on the lines and fixing some of the more glaringly obvious flaws.
First up the moon isn’t exactly round in the original skect is it. Craters causing bumps aside that’s sort of an important thing to get right, as is the fact that the nose seems to be missing a nostril for some reason.

Next up while I want Clocktown to be slightly wonky and disturbing looking it would be nice if the clock tower was at least a little more symmetrical especially since the face of the clock itself  preferably needs to be round.

The mountains have also changed, I realized that having them pointing all over the place wasn’t helping the flow of the eyes around the image so now they bend either left or right depending on the side they are on.

Finally inspired by the way I’ve drawn the giant I want to go for a style thats a bit more inspired by the current generation of western cartoons so smooth curves and long limbs are the order of the day. Having fixed those things and now with an image whose lines are much more obvious there are still some things that need sorting.

At the end of the day this is just a copy of the original with slightly adjusted lines if anything the level of detail has actually decreased.

Phase 4. Up Detail.

It’s time to flip the image and find more errors our eyes hadn’t noticed before. The first things I notice are that the areas below the town and the size of the moon have to be adjusted. The face of the moon just always felt like it was too big for the size of the moon itself so that got a boost pushing it off the page slightly.

After changing the mountains the grassy area bellow the town just wasn’t working for me anymore so I adjusted it to follow the same curve as the moon. Now I found myself with an image thats made up of a series of concentric circles radiating out from the moon, not really what I was going for but you cant do golden spirals every mat i guess. While I’m undecided at this stage whether the town should be falling to pieces as the moon crashes down it’s clear having the mountains crumble adds a nice touch and helps connect the various circles.

The rest of the upgrade mainly involves adding detail and making as many lines as possible into  S’s (just look at the moon’s face for a good example, especially the nose). This is also the first point in time where Skull Kid’s feet get fixed they should never have been both facing the same way, on the downside I will now need to redraw his hands before I move to the mat because they have lost detail somehow.

Phase 5. On The Mat
The only major changes after phase 4 are that I add in a bunch of craters to the non face section of the moon to make it more interesting and a rather intense fire suddenly appears from nowhere to act as a way to make sure the two sides of the image are definitely connected and to guide the eye up and around the page (and yes maybe to add a spiral back in).

I chose blue for the moons colour scheme in the end since I seem to have coloured quite a number of yellow moons it was a nice change and I figured the darker shades would look more sinister.
Not that Link seems to care, perhaps he’s finally ok with his perpetual groundhog 72 hours.

Disgaea Raspberyl Playmat

The specs for this particular mat as you have probably already gessoed were a pink theme + Raspberyl and her crew. And oh boy is it pink I mean I guess it could be more pink but not by much.

As for the background, after having done quite a few mats of the same style I felt like mixing things up a bit and trying something I haven't really done before. I like to think they are standing in some photo booth in a demon world shopping mall somewhere, at least thats why the diamond checker background, also pink, is at that jaunty angle anyway. 

Originally I had planned to have the scrollwork overlap the characters but by the time I got to that part it was obvious that was both unnecessary and wouldn't have come up very clearly anyway, I've been using these materials for some time now and you get a sense for how things are going to look.

That said evenI was surprised by some of the depth the colours of their hair came out. I did build up quite a few layers while trying to get to the shades I wanted but still.

Bayonetta Playmat

There is some debate as to whether or not spines are useful structures. Personally I find mine handy for keeping my upper body from being somewhere around my waist. Bayonetta's designers clearly feel differently however, often contorting her into a wide array of painfully impossible poses.

Her chiropractor must make a fortune.

Back Pain aside I have a few more mats from 2012 to get through before I start on 2013 and this is one of them.

Two things happened before I started production of this mat the first was I figured out how to do white on a much larger scale, not just leave white space but actually add white, and secondly I bought a different brand of black for the line work. these two elements combined to inform the overall look of the final piece with its much lighter than my usual colour schemes and a generally more realistic looking face and hair, although that may have as much to so with scale as anything else. A few mats on and I think maybe I would have gone a bit darker with it and if you have been reading my posts you will notice I havent been able to resist having an element of an orange sky in there somewhere, but overall for what it is and what I learnt from crating it I am quite happy with the end results.

As far as the curvature of her spine goes, after some research into gymnastics, I settled on something not quite as extreme as most artwork depicts her. I could have pushed the curve a bit more, real people can bend slightly more than I have depicted, but the sketches where I did proved that it didn't take much to push it over the edge from believable to somewhat silly looking.

Much like the characters famed flexibility its also my first mat to have been designed to work either way around which explains the rather nondescript horizon and general jaunty angle everything is draw at. There are a number of extra details that you have to consider when you decide to do this sort of thing though, the main one being that you really need to get the shadows right, which probably explains the minimal shadowing on the background elements. Its also why I prefer to view the image this way up since it was the direction I worked on the mat the most and therefore makes the most sense to me. People who haven't worked on it however may have other opinions and thats one of the nice things about this style, the added decision making.

I was quite a way into production before i noticed I had neglected to add her glasses though, thankfully I remembered as it also solved an issue I was having with her hair making her look to masculine when viewed one way around, its funny how things work out sometimes, one little detail can change everything.

Persona 3 Nyx Playmat

I'm nothing if not dedicated. Like the Reborn mat I put quite a bit of time into researching this project, luckily I already had played about a third of the game so I had a prettily good idea what I was getting into.

It was a good thing I did too since If I hadn't we would probably be looking at an additional character and totally diffrent personas. While its not alway possible I find playing, reading, or watching the media the mat will be based on is usually the best way of getting a feel for the characters involved, how they move, interact, their personalities, and drives, which in turn helps inform the overall design and layout of the image.

Which in this case is based on another of the spirals I am so fond of with a serious consideration for trying to fit as many characters on the mat as possible while still making sure that Nyx was the main focus and that she loomed over our intrepid heros. These are probably some of the smallest characters I have done and as such have to mostly be made up of blocks of colour, the in-game art style really informed this look and was a big help, and its also one of the reasons why they are facing away faces at this size being little more than dots and lines, not that that stopped me trying to do the really tiny details and checker pattern on the death card. Doing the designs for the personas was also quite interesting as you don't really realise it while your playing but you never really see their backs in the game, which made orpheus and his harp slightly tricky and Isis very much so.

The colours are probably my favourite part of this mat though, from the heavy use of black to the creepy green sky and sickly lime coloured moon, from the tiny gradients in the characters hair to the almost right but a tiny bit suspect lighting (mainly the global illumination could be a tiny bit stronger in places, the dynamic lights are fine). Most of which was possible due to several new tools that I had just acquired, especially in the areas that have turned to out to be particularly bright, something that will turn up again in a number of the later mats.

Still haven't quite finished the game totally though...