Jiraiya Custom Playmat / Colouring Line Work

Last time we focused on line art and a number of ways to make your lines more dynamic and interesting. We continue where we left off, with the lines set out on the mat itself and ready for what we are going to be talking about today, how best to go about colouring.

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But first, a slight rewind.

Before we dive into colouring I just want to mention our starting point this time around. This image should have been the final sketch before moving onto the mat proper, it's the one I sent to the person who asked for the mat at least, all the elements are there but after moving from pencil to pen the fact the proportions of the body are all over the place was bothering me. A large stack of revisions later and Jiraiya is looking more human, more 3D, and ready for prime time.

There are many ways to check to see if your design looks right, from mirroring and flipping to changing the media your working in. It's best to figure that out before laying the lines out on the mat though, since theres no going back after you have.

Which is one of the reasons I tend to leave any lines until last. Something that may have happened this time had I not done the Rarity mat just beforehand.

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Line and colour don’t mix

That heading is misleading, lines and colours do mix thats sort of the problem and another reason I tend to leave lines until last.When we do decide to start with the lines we have to understand how the two are going to interact or find ourselves having to waste time redrawing the lines at the end.

If your anything like me your going to be using Fine-liners for the lines. Brushes are great for large areas of colour but for complex designs or small details you want control and crisp spread free edges. There are plenty of options for this phase, sharpies will do the job if that's all you have access to but I prefer to have access to a verity of nib sizes so use something more specialised.

The main thing to make sure of is that whatever you use is going to have some resistance to water and wear, a players palms resting on the mat is a good example of both.

What you wont be able to do is find something that resists water and the colours we tend to use. Sharpies for example will resist water but not wear or other sharpies.

We still need to know how the colours are going to interact with the lines so heres a handy picture.

Different colours have different quantities of pigment.

The light colours: Yellows, Pastels, etc,

Have the least pigment so if you brush them over a line they are the least likely to cause it to fade or spread. That doesn’t mean you get a free pass yes you can be less careful but press too hard or build up too many layers and not only will the line spread it will be really obvious and is the hardest to fix.

The Mid colours: Most Reds, Orange, Greens.

With more pigment comes greater risk one pass could be enough to cause spread and it could be quite a distance, worse these colours are still light enough that its going get noticed.

The Dark colours: Blues, Purples, Black, some dark Greens.

Spread becomes less of an issue as you get darker as your not going to see it. That doesn’t mean you can relax though since these colours introduce a new problem, Fade. If anything Fade is worse than spread since you can hide that with darker colours, Fade on the other hand is essentially the colours removing the lines you spent all that time on earlier sure we can go over them again but with care we shouldn’t have to.

The other issue should be obvious, if we are using black next to a black line we probably don’t need the line in the first place, or if we do, we need to make sure there is a gap between the two.

Which leads neatly on to the next section how do we do that? And more importantly avoid Spread and Fade in general?

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It helps to have good eyes and a steady hand, or a magnifying glass and patience.

Here's a look at an early stage of colouring. While technically an anime inspired mat Jiraiya's design is inspired by kabuki and I'm quite interested in getting a more traditional Japanese art style into this piece. I didn’t take it quite that far in the end but after looking at the legs and red areas I did decide I preferred gradients over flat shading.

Anyway your here for tips to avoid damaging the liens so moving on. You can see in this image the green areas currently leave a slight gap between themselves and any nearby lines. We know this light green wont Fade or Spread the liens that much but when we are blocking the design in quickly we don’t want to take any chances especially around those thin lines.

The red on the other hand runs right up to lines. Here I have figured this material isn’t going to change much over the course of colouring so have spent the extra time getting it to a more finished state. You can colour as you like at the center of the space but as you approach the edges your going to want to use the way the red spreads to your advantage, you don’t need to go up to the line to get the colour there it just takes some practice to judge the distances.

Even so you can still see how reds tend to cause Spread in the corners with the most black ink. Luckily the corners are probably the places you want darker reds anyway but we will have to do a bit of a cleanup later.

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Using the enemy to your advantage.

While we want to avoid the lines spreading or fading there are some times you are going to decide you no longer want a line where it is. Thats a bit of a problem when you want them to be permanent but there are a few things we can do if we need to.

We have seen the first way to remove the line already. Just cover it with a similar colour and it will go away. Ok now you have a large black splotch rather than a line but at least its gone and if you have planned it right the splotch looks natural where it is perhaps its part of a shadow. (you can see I have used this method to reshape the lower body of the large red frog)

But what if it doesn’t look right?

The next method takes things more scientifically, we want to use the buildup of pigment to fade the line but we also need to know how lighter colours can sometimes overwrite darker ones. In this example we cover the line with a deep blue until its faded enough to no longer be visible then use a lighter blue to cover that. We can do this because the lighter blues tend to have as much pigment as the darker ones. They wont erase lines but they will erase darker blues (which is why its easier to blend from light to dark blue than the other way) With a lighter blue in place next we can blend into other colours we have to be a bit careful it doesn’t all go muddy brown but if we really need to change things this way will do the job.

Next time a look at digital design, until then try an stay inside the lines. 

Kakashi Custom Playmat

Once again it comes back to spirals it seems. I wasn't even aiming to use them in this image, it just formed as I sketched and re-sketched the first version.

Which as it happened was more than just a few times. I knew the pose I was aiming for but just couldn't get the angle of the face quite right, kakashi's mask hindering matters further as it obliterates most of the usual lower facial structure.   I ended up having to bring a large mirror into my workspace and work from live reference, which is probably why his hand is about life-size (although the rest of him is quite heavily foreshortened after that - you have to assume he's an arms length away from you).

I mention spirals a fair bit in these posts so I figured it was about time I talked a little more about them. There are a number of ways you can lay out an image, for example in photography and film especially the rule of thirds is quite useful to know in order to keep your subjects within the frame. Similarly and what I tend to gravitate towards is the use of the golden ratio, a spiral structure that tends to crop up quite a bit in nature, and which humans tend to find ascetically pleasing. 

You will however probably have noticed the image above doesn't quite match the golden ratio exactly but then I did mention that I wasn't really aiming for that layout in particular so its not a bad approximation, especially since the thumb pretty much rests at the center point. The other nice thing about using this method is you can stack many spirals inside one another all at different angles (mainly 90 degree variations) and all different sizes to build up a composition.

Another obvious thing I should probably mention is that the hands have changed between the sketch and the finished mat. The one in the foreground bothered me because the pose was going to be a right pain to make look right. The shading would have been all over the place, drawing the palm and the backs of the fingers in the same image can end up looking weird. The background hand wasn't at quite the right angle anyway, I knew that from messing about with the image digitally, so when it came time to work on the mat I just decided the ball of lightning would look cooler if the whole hand had just been engulfed. Theres still a bit of a hint of it being there, between that an an implied arm I let the viewers brain do the rest.

As for the lettering, the straight lines weren't much of a problem and I found a different type of tape which seems much better than what I had been using, the S on the other hand...

See, the colour I use for the black backgrounds likes having hard edges to work against or else it wont create hard lines and has a tendency to bleed. On the other hand I'm not going to get a curve with the tape I'm using. In the end i had to cut out a template, in two sections because of the size, and tape them down in the center while holding the edges in place, you cant really use any sort of tack on a mat since it would leave residue or interfere with the colours.

Inside the lettering as the background got progressively darker I worried it might have gone too dark. One of the things about the blues I use however is that they have a tendency to overwrite each other, even the lighter ones have enough pigment to draw over black, so if I wasn't happy with something i could always lighten it again. The finishing touch was adding a variety of other colours into the mix a bit like how space is dark but full of colour, you know, to add interest.

Well thats Naruto mat 3, I could probably spend several more paragraphs talking about how I spent a fair bit of time looking at all the different ways his hair gets rendered media, or all the little things I noticed about his jacket but I think thats enough for now. I do quite like using words as the framework of the layout though so I'm sure we will see this style again. 

Next time I finally 'assemble' a post about a mat I haven't been able to talk about for two months.        

Naruto Custom Playmat 2

So this mat is based on a scene from the Naruto manga, even so I spent some time looking at various versions of it mainly to give me a better idea of the movement and action of the image and also partly because I have only watched two episodes of Shippuden and wanted to be more acquainted with the art style. The end result is therefore a bit of an amalgam of ideas from the manga and the anime.

One of the things I found interesting is that there isn't a great deal of difference between the two characters outlines. As someone who hasn't got to know them over the course of several volumes/episodes they are basically two guys with long black hair and red armour, most of the differences come from their accessories.

Making sure your characters can be easily identified by their outlines is one of the most important elements of the design process, if people can't tell characters apart from their silhouettes then those characters need more work done on them, and if that means giving one of them a gunbai and the other a big scroll than thats just what you do. Its also why the Pokemon anime can do the whole 'who's that Pokemon' thing because aside from the ball shaped Pokemon and the butterflies the vast majority are easy to tell apart, not an unimportant factor when you have 500+ to deal with and only a bunch of small sprites to render them (at least originally).

To alleviate the problem for people who don't know them you place them on the correct sides of the image and have the backgrounds match whats going on in the top frame, I've also had element from the top image run into the lower ones, some of the trees for example and the way the fox's tail follows the shape of the hair. I have also slightly exaggerated the style of the characters hair making the one on the right marginally more thin and pointy while on the left emphasising the curves 

There are a number of things a mat does not like, any piece of art really for that mater, and the two biggest are direct sunlight and oils from human skin. Which is why you will find important paintings behind special glass and while thats a little unreasonable for a playmat there are a number of things you can do to alleviate things.

Originally my mats were au natural it would take the colours days to set, the blues especially with their higher pigment counts would take forever, there had to be a quicker way. So I just started experimenting, I had a relatively good idea of places to start but as you can imagine after spending time creating something using it for testing can make you slightly apprehensive.

The first layer of defence I added was therefore based on observation, it takes time to set the colour is there a way to speed that up? Thats all the reaction seal is really about, speeding up the drying time, it also has the added benefit of removing excess pigment that the mat couldn't absorb.

Seal layer one got added at the beginning of this year, it adds some water resistance and UV absorption and acts generally as a stabiliser for the colours. don't use hairspray though contrary to what teachers tell you that doesn't actually do much and in this instance can damage the colours depending on your medium.

Seal layer 2 has only been used on two mats so far and was more of a gamble, you cant use lacquers or varnishes directly on the colour because depending on your medium they may melt it. Still I wanted something extra on top so whent for a product thats meant to add a sort of plastic layer to things. Again it adds to the water resistance and UV absorption, its also supposed to be a gloss finish but is a little hard to tell after adding the previous layer.

The mat and the colours themselves also have a element of water resistance built in, the only thing you should avoid is getting the mat wet and then rubbing it to hard.

In the end the main factor of the lifespan of a mat like any piece of art or clothing is how well you look after it, don't leave it in direct sunlight to long, and try and avoid to much rubbing.

Next time, er, I dunno 2013 mat 10 I guess, and maybe i tell the story of how I number things.

Naruto Game-Mat

I once overheard someone saying that thy thought this mat looked like a proper anime mat, the fact that at least initially one of my pieces can do that to someone is incredibly heartening as pens don't generally replicate something generated digitally very easily especial on fabric.

Probably one of the few mats I have done where i have been comfortable leaving so much white space in a design as generally i like to fill the whole page with colour but the design and the art style really demanded it and it makes a nice change of pace.

Naruto's hand in the bottom left was also quite difficult to get right, hands are not easy at the best of times so it took me quite some time to come up with a position that looked right.

So I have done Naruto, Bleach, and Reaborn mats, about the only big Shonen anime I haven't done yet is Dragonball, although I would quite like to do a Buso Renkin mat at some point.

Anime Yugioh Alters