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.

Walking Dead Playmat

Hands, so very many hands...

So yeah, needless to say since this mat I have had a much better grasp on drawing hands, at various angles and holding weapons, which has come in quite helpful since. 

Most noticeably on the Hellsing mat that came directly after this one, where the gloves and guns are one of the primary focuses, and I don't doubt that the mats that came after this would have looked differently without the insights learnt here.

I also seem to have spent quite a lot of time researching weapons since I began this whole endeavour, a theme that runs though my work perhaps, similar to the large number of moons that also appear, or a function of the types of people that request mats? Perhaps its to early to tell. In either case at least now I know how to draw revolvers facing forward, something of a learning experience in and of itself but also something I had always wondered about.   

Design wise here we have a mix of the comic and TV series visuals, and also the highest concentration of realistic looking faces on any of my mats (while there are others that beat it in the overall total of characters those predominately feature anime style simplified art). It turns out faces in this style and at this size are quite tricky on this material, you have to build up the colour slowly so as to avoid it running and in this instance I am also having to deal with the fact that I decide to go super heavy on the shadows for a more graphic comic book style.

Using black in this way isn't something I'm used to, comic style art wasn't something teachers were particularly keen on while I was at school and college as such I didn't want to just go into this mat blind and start blocking things in. Thankfully having a computer and graphics tablet handy allows you to test out ideas beforehand and while I was at it I also did the standard suite of changes based on looking at the image while flipped.

Having finished the mat there was something about the logo that I felt that it still needed, finally deciding that the red was to bright in comparison to the more subdued hues of the survivors clothes and the blue walkers so preceded to add some damage, as if the logo itself has been infected too.

Definitely one of the more technically chalanging designs and one of my favourites, its always nice when pieces stretch your skills and push you forward.