Great Expectation - Pokemon Praposal

When I get asked to create something, for the most part, I tend to assume its because the person asking has some idea in their head they want realised, a cool concept they can't quite bring to life by themselves perhaps or a thought they need solidifying. This can take you on fun and interesting journeys but once you have taken on the mission you start to realise there are expectations beyond those set out in the brief you must also meet, expectations that come from ingrained cultural trends, expectations people aren’t even aware they have since they are subconscious but if you were to leave them out they would know there was something missing.

Today's story is one of meeting expectations, working digitally, and getting a rhino to sit.

So whats the brief?

Two Pokemon: A Drowzee is proposing to a Rhyhorn. The style should be more like the early anime than the modern designs.

Two clear expectations then. The first a conscious desire to replicate a particular look, 1995 era cartoons in this case. The second the unconscious expectation of what a proposal should look like.

Lets take them in order.

Here's the finalised background. Why have I painted the whole thing rather than only the areas that will be viable? That's not really the right question. It should be. How would they have produced backgrounds back when they still used cells and paint?

Your going to have several layers of clear film. The top most layer is going to have the character on it, you could decided that on the lowest layer where your background will be painting the bits that are under the characters would be a waste of time, I mean no one will ever see them right?. Or you could look at it the other way. Why add back in the areas the character moves away from when you can draw the whole background once.

Well its the same thing with digital. Most drawing programs have layers, if i'm going to get that old fashioned feel I might as well take advantage of them. More importantly it means that if I decide to modify the figures in some way, make them smaller or move them about for example I'm not going to have to keep going back in and fixing the background,

The colour pallet for this piece is a bit of a mix. I've made sure to choose colours that match those the characters would have been originally but the background takes most of its cues from modern digital pallet. Did you know that when the show switched from analog to digital colour the staff were worried the fans wouldn’t accept the change? So worried in fact that they deliberately damaged the image quality with special filters. Over time they reduced the effect so by the time they removed it the audience had acclimatised to the new look. I mention this because while the brief was to create an old school feel the human brain is a fickle thing. They’ve been using the digital colours for over a decade now, colours which would have been chosen based on the paints they originally used. Subconsciously these are the colours you expect to see, the originals are the ones that wont look quite right. For another example go back and watch an early versions of the Simpsons, are those the colours you associate with the show?

Background painted its time to release the Pokemon.

…

Have you ever seen a rhino sit down? I can't say I ever remember having done so either but luckily for me they can because I needed Ryhorn's front legs free.

Have you ever seen someone propose? That's more likely to be a yes but even if you haven’t I bet you can imagine the scene.

What did you imagine? The man down on one knee holding out the ring? The woman with a look of surprise, hands moving subconsciously to protect her face or cover her mouth?

Yeah you and everyone else.

So that's the scene that's expected but how do we do that with one monster who doesn’t really have knees and another that stands on four legs?

We take liberties that's how, the pose is more important than fake creatures anatomy. At least thats what i thought until i started looking up reference material and found rhinos can sit down in a pose that's much like that of a teddy bear.

That frees up the front end now on to Drowzee.

The designs of Pokemon have evolved over the years. Pikachu is the most obvious example starting out pudgy he's slimmed down considerably. Luckily for me Drowzee hasn’t undergone quite as radical a change. He doesn’t really have knees in the original but we can use grass to disguise that we have added some. It's a bit like those images where circles and other shapes obscure parts making your brain fill in the gaps with what it expects to see. More important is to fet the face right he used to have a more pronounced curve in his nose.

I'm painting the characters in a very similar way to  how they would have done back in the day. I create the lines then move on to painting the blocks of colour. It's just I've done the lines in a vector drawing program so they scale to any size without loss of detail and I'm painting with colours that have an undo function if I mess anything up. I could have done the colouring in vectors too but to avoid too crisp and modern a look I decided it was best to stick with old fashioned pixels.

As for the choice of colours for the Mon's. This time I will be pulling from the originals, they aren’t all that different to be honest perhaps a tad warmer, it's more that there used to be more variation between scene and episodes because of noise on the film.

Thats actually the last piece of the puzzle. Once I've got the image finalised I'm going to want to add blur and noise to create that feel. Not too much though we don’t want to lose the detail. The filters that do this have been around almost as long as the drawing programs themselves, its certainly quicker than trying to get the same look using paper (Since, you know we are trying to imitate film)

Putting it all together the last expectation I need to meet is that this image might end up being used elsewhere. What if they want to use it as a wedding invite or on their website? If thats the case the text should really use a fancy curly font. A clean white boarder would also seem appropriate but a square image seems a tad uninspired.

To keep things interesting I go for a non standard edge to the image, making the white background feel more connected to the image by turning it into the silhouette of foreground grass and the edges of the trees This phase is really where working digitally saves time and opens up options. With access to almost limitless numbers of fonts (Don’t go to crazy) theres bound to be one that suits your project. Not only that but you can move them around and resize things until you get everything just right, I don’t envy the designers who used to have to build magazine layouts by hand.

When you think your finished you send it to them and hope you met all the expectations you needed to cover. Digitally, via email or message obviously. If you haven’t, well you have your file still, its easy enough to make changes.

Like I did to this post's introduction. Originally I was going to concentrate on the working digitally side of things. By the end it was obvious it wouldn’t have met that expectation.

Thais all for today.. expect a more analog related post in the future.

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.

Lucario Custom Playamat Or How to Draw a Lucario

While thinking about how I could present this post I realised that for the most part I tend to give a overview of the process involved in creating the mat but very rarely do I go into the details of how to actually draw things in the first place. So this time as we look at the Lucario mat I'll go though some of the stages involved in sketching out the character at the end I'll also go over a few of the other techniques involved in colouring it.

The main idea here is to give an insight into the theory and technical processes at each stage, while I encourage people to follow along its more about the process than a final product so saying its a  'How To Draw Lucario Tutorial' in the title is probably not entirely correct but still.

We have a lot to cover today so with the preamble over lets dive straight in.

Stage One: Starting Somewhere

So you have a rather intimidating sheet of paper in front of you and a pencil and eraser to one side and your stuck because you have no idea of where to start.

Click on the image to enlarge

Thats relatively easily resolved since your not starting here but will first need to go to your preferred connection to the internet to do some research and gather reference material. Two paragraphs in and I already have you doing homework but this stage is important, we could work from memory of course but human memory is incredibility unreliable when it comes to this sort of task I could draw Lucario without reference but how much detail would I be missing and would the various body parts be to scale?. Go to your search engine of choice and do an image search for Lucario.

Well at least now we have a basic idea of what our subject looks like. Lucario has an essentially human body plan with a fox/wolf head and very odd knees and lower legs. I want to liken the process to life drawing, except we aren’t trying to copy the poses or style.

Back at our blank sheet of paper unfortunately nothing much has happened in our absence. We will rectify that by drawing a circle. Don’t get hung up on making it neat, sketchy is fine better at this point anyway. You can see that I've just roughly gone around a few times and got something that is mostly circular.

The next thing to mention are the various digital overlays.

The Green line is where I initially placed the characters feet, the Purple line represents where they will end up by the end of the process but we wont worry about that just yet.

The red box represents the general space that I want Lucario to occupy. Going over the lines isn’t an issue, in reality the box is purely imaginary, but if your too far out it might be an idea to check to make sure the various limbs are actual as long as you have made them.

The blue I-bars represent the length and width of the head and will later show up again used in the characters skeleton. The length/width of the head is a universally important measurement for working out the scale of the rest of the body so its a useful trick to know.

You will notice that my Lucario seems like he is only going to be two heads tall with a bit extra at the bottom thats because I've already drawn the final image and this is a redraw so I know exactly how things will end up looking. Normally you wouldn’t know though and in Image 2 you can see that there are two sets of circles.

Look back at your reference material and hold your pencil up to the image with one end placed at the top of Lucario's head (ignore the ears) Place a finger/thumb on the pencil where the bottom of the head would be then move the top of the pencil down to where the head meats the neck you should notice that the area between the top of the pencil and your finger/thumb is filled by Lucario's torso. Moving down again and the area between them will be the upper legs and then finally the lower legs. This lets up know that Lucario is usually 4 heads tall if he is standing up straight.

In this example though our Lucario is going to be closer to 3 heads tall. Its not because he's short but because we are drawing him in a more dynamic pose causing various body parts to get tucked in behind or foreshortened. Foreshortening happens when elements of an object are closer to the view than others, in this particular case Lucario's head and the front of his upper legs are the elements closest to us and its torso and right arm are further away.

So in Image 3 instead of placing the circle for the torso directly below the one for the head we shift it up, the top of the circle will help us identify where the neck would be (in this instance it is hidden by the head) We can also use the bottom of the circle to tell us where the torso joins the upper legs at the hips.

While in Image 2 there is only one circle representing where the legs will be in Image 3 it has been replaced by two, there are after all two legs and they wont be directly under our character. Much like the torso the lower legs will tuck in under and behind other elements of the body which again will result in Lucario not being 4 heads tall.

Normally at this point if I didn’t know exactly what I was drawing I would just be laying down circles and seeing what positions looked good. We would have ended up with a selection of variations that looked similar to the one in Image 7 but we aren’t skipping ahead to that point instead we are going to go over a process that can be quite helpful when it comes to drawing characters.

So at the end of stage 1 what do we have to show for ourselves? Mostly a bunch of circles and a slightly better idea of the placement of various body parts. In part 2 we will look ad turning those circles into something a bit more substantial.

After the break I will finish off the main tutorial, mention a few other techniques and wrap things up.

Step Two: The Leg Bone's Connected To The What Now?

With the rough outline in place its time to work in more detail. In Image 4 the circles have been swapped out with dark blue I-bars to represent the characters bones. The new smaller circles represent where the various joints and hands would be and the light blue line helps us place the shoulder joint that would mostly be hidden by the head it could probably do with being on the same diagonal as the upper bone on the leg to the right but we wont worry about that to much right now..

In Image 5 I have added the let arm bones in red, the other red bones represent things like the ears, right arm, feet and the weird section that sits between Lucario's shorts and the knees. Its a slightly strange leg layout which is one of the reasons i've hidden them in behind.

In Image 6 we can start to apply flesh to the bones so to speak, the easiest way of doing this is with triangles. The upper legs obviously aren’t triangular, they are more like sausages, but we can fix that in the next step. The triangles however do give us a good shape to work from when it comes time to figure out how the various muscles are going to shape the limbs.

Like I mentioned at the end of Step 1 this stage is more theory than a process that I go though every time I draw a character but at the same time its something you need to know in order that you don’t have to bother going though the steps, you could even take it further and start pinning real muscle groups onto the skeleton building up more and more detail so as to give a better base to work on when it comes to adding the skin you may for example find that where a group of muscles twist in the torso the skin should be under tension. Another stage further and having added the skin you could then tell areas where clothes would be lose or bunching up. Its all about how far you want to take the level of detail and in this instance since Lucario is not exactly the most detailed character to start with we wont be going as far as al that.

Image 7 (which can bee seen bellow) takes us back to our sketching, and we can see that I've rounded out the upper legs and blended them to the torso. Everything else is also somewhat more rounded because its a physical sketch rather then an example done on the computer but you should still be able to make out how the triangles on the arm connect tot he shoulder and hand to look like ice cream cones just like in the previous image.

I have also added a circle to show where Lucario's nose will end up being and a curved line that runs from the top of the head down the middle of the body to help me find the center line which will be handy when I'm trying to get the eyes and spike on the chest in the right place.

Step 3: Splines

Usually I would just get a darker pencil for this next section and draw over what I already had but since that tends to result in something somewhat less than easy to untangle visually I'll start over on a fresh piece of paper.

In the last section we figured out our pose and scale then moved on to an initial attempt at fleshing things out. With that image as a guide we can now go a bit further and start to add more detail and generally be a bit more careful and clean with our lines.

Image 8 shows the first stage of the redraw and I am attempting to keep the lines much more fluid using single strokes. While this might not be the style you choose to use every time (theres something to be said for sharp angles) I am currently somewhat obsessed with drawing everything using S-curves.

This has partly come out of the fact I tend to use a lot of spirals in my layouts and partly because of other artistic influences I have been exposed to recently. As mentioned above you don’t always have to do things this way but one of the benefits is more natural looking shapes and another is that its quite an easy way to draw smooth lines especial on the computer using a graphics tablet.

In any case Image 9 highlights where most of the various curves are. You don’t have to stop at one S either they can flow into each other like the long snaking line that starts by the ear on the right and goes all the way down and around to bellow the elbow.

This Image also starts to show how the body bulges around joints, in a human there would also be more definition in the arms but Lucario isn’t exactly a weightlifter and even the slight hints of muscle I have added aren’t really cartoon accurate since normally the upper arms would be almost flat.

At this point increasing the level of detail is just a process of repeating the last few stages, take the curved image and redraw it again adding things like the eyes mouth and accessory’s (in this case the spikes and the fur around the neck and ears). The hardest part of this particular image I found to draw was Lucario's nose it took a large amount of tweaking before I got the angle right and without the nose in the right place its hard to place the eye on the left. Much like the rest of the image the mouth is just a really curved S, its just one side is much wider and bigger than the other, drawing eyes also involves an S for the brow followed by an elongated circle with the top cut off for the iris.

Step Four: Check, Edit, Enlarge

At the end of the last Step you will have been left with an image that is almost finished, theres just one problem you have have hit a wall in terms of the detail you can pit down at the scale your woking at. The two main option would be to start using a light box and mechanical pencil to create finer lines or to go big, since mats are large anyway my preferred method is to scale up to A2 (if you don't have an A2 piece of paper a piece of A3 set up vertically is also fine in this instance)

First though we need to do a little more editing. You could do the next few sections on paper as part of the last step if you wanted, I've just chosen to split them off and and talk about then here since I will be doing this next section on the computer after scanning the image in.

In Image 10 the blue lines from Image 1 are back I've also added a diagonal grid to check how the various components are lining up and while I like the way the ear in the right leads down to the nose and the leg on the left also follows that diagonal I have noticed the elbow could possibly do with being shifted to the left slightly in order to get the angle of the arm more in line with the leg on the right.

After pushing the body up to the purple line I also notice that the legs and arm might be a tad on the thin side in comparison to the head so I have enlarged them which has had the added effect of hiding more of the leg on the left.

All this messing about adjusting things, including any changes that you notice need making after mirroring the image are based on an eye for detail and form that you will build up over time, much like any other skill its not something that your going to have straight away however if you are looking at something you have drawn and can sense that there might be something not quite right even if you cant quite tell what it is thats a good start.

By now you should have redrawn the image enough times to have a reasonable ability to draw it at a larger, scale either freehand or by printing out an enlarged sketch and working from a light box. The greater scale will give you space to add more detail you could even combine all the methods and add a mechanical pencil to the mix if you were going for super detailed designs .

By this point Lucario had also gained a tail and those weird things that make the black thing over his face look like a mask I had left them out up until now since they didn’t add much to the tutorial side of things but again like the rest of the image they are made up of S-curves this time flowing in the same direction as the special effects to add more sense of movement. Just remember the tip of the tail needs a crook in it. The extra space available has also let me get a more pointed feral definition to the shape of the head and I have spent a bit more time moving the arms into positions I found more pleasing in relation to the ball of energy and the other limbs

When your happy with your finished design you can either go straight to redrawing it on the mat or scan it into the computer and mess about with it more there. Or you could start over and create another or perhaps do some sketches of other Pokemon and add then into the design. There’s really no right or wrong at this point.

That said this brings us to the end of this section of the tutorial, in the next Step I will look at some of the colouring techniques.

Step Five: Because This Tutorial Wasn’t Long Enough.

Finally I'll skip ahead now to the end of the colouring just to quickly go over a few other techniques. Since I wasn’t going for a cartoony look anyway I decided to add a fur effect. Adding the effect mainly involves spending some great deal of time painting alternate light and dark patches, first in lines following the contours of the shape (knowing where the muscles are would be handy here) and then moving up to an area above that line and doing the same thus creating a layered effect.

Similarly by alternating light and dark in larger patches you can create a better impression of realistic lighting. You can use this effect to create edges by having a shadowed area follow a line of light or vice versa.

Taking the idea one step further you can create quite realistic metallic objects especially if your careful with your gradients and make sure it looks like its reflecting the environment around it.

Step Six: Wrapping Things Up

I realise its been quite a long post today but I hope that perhaps others may have picked up at least one or two things along the way. As it turns out it was quite a useful exercise for my own learning also since it forced me to try and find a way to get the various concepts that I take for granted across through the use of images and text.

It also showed me why many people charge for teaching others things, because putting together all this stuff can take quite a long time.

Next time, hum the adams family theme, or the musters for that matter because we are going ghoulish with the Wright family.

Blackflame Dragons Custom Playmat

This time we are going to look at a mat full of dragons, go through the general steps involved in this mats production .and go over the general Yugioh dragon style guides, but first.

An aside on the nature of mat relocation.

Before that however i must first note that the owner of this mat had it with them at YCS London this past weekend (October 2014) where it was stolen, while there are a number of my mats that I know of that have gone on to explore the world with people other then those who they were originally designed for, in this particular instance its obviously not an ideal situation so if anyone comes across it in their own travels I would be grateful if you let me know, either on FB or the contact form. 

Going forward in addition to the logo, date, and unique number on each mat i will most likely be adding this sites web address. As I have mentioned before i cant help thinking that it would be quite nice to have some way to track mats, even if its just a web form that people can fill in,  it occurs to me that had I known this when I was working on my final year project at university it would be the sort of thing that would be a relatively easy First, assuming of course you could get enough feedback.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Musings on potential apps aside this mat called for the cramming of as many dragons of both Yugioh and Pokemon verities as possible into the space available, while simultaneously maintaing enough room for a complex background. As discussed last time theres a scale limit to how small you can go doing the Pendulum mat first definitely helped get me in the right frame of mind. Design wise Its relatively straightforward to take a group of characters and squeeze as many as possible into the available space, i have done it before myself with both the Vampire and another mat I don't believe I've talked about yet. It's mostly a process of Tetris-ing everyone until you find poses that look right and fit the correct scale while working within the golden ratio layout for example. On the other hand having to get sixteen characters to fit on a background that the viewer has to be able to parse mentally as an actual object is a tad more difficulty and requires slightly more in the way of design preparation

Your initial sketches are going to have to take into account things like how the creatures wings have a tendency to make them at least twice their body size and can obscure large parts of the background for minimal gain. theres a good reason a number of dragons are placed around the edges of the mat for example.

All the colours of the rainbow, well five anyway, if one of those is dragon.

Thumbnail sketches done the first thing I started on was the background. Strangely it felt a bit like I was working on a cycle of basic land for Magic the Gathering. Admittedly though that may have had something to do with both Yugioh and pokemon also having element systems and the fact that the background needed to feature a mountain with ice fire earth lightning and sky areas.

Even all the way back at the twilight mat you could say I have a particular style when it comes to drawing crumbling rock. The glacier, mountain, and lava areas on the other hand did require me to spend some time looking at actual reference material, the way the trees and grass on the lower slope gradually become more spares as the gradient increases or the way the snow and ice build up at the edges of the glacier are not just things I've made up but are actual physical phenomena that I have noticed looking at the world around me and reference images.

Most of the time when I'm doing mats these days I'll work on the full scale sketch that includes everything in it and go from there. In this instance however I wanted to make sure I had a real place fully designed before I started adding the dragons. Doing it the other way could have meant large blank spaces opening up in the background if i suddenly decided that I didn't like the placement of one thing or another which would have then needed filling back in and thats just more work, also you cant always guarantee you will get the same look.

After the jump we look at turning Pokemon into Yugioh dragons and finish going through the process of describing how I went about making this mat, theres pictures and everything.

What a big nose you have. All the better to impale you with.

With the background done the next task was to go through and Yugioh-ize the Pokemon. its actually a relatively easy process in some ways, at least when it comes to dragons because Yugioh's particular brand tend to follow a pretty strict style guide which seems to read as follows, assuming the person who wrote it is mildly sarcastic:

If you have wings you will likely have some sort of bizarre protrusions from what on birds would be the wrist joint. It could be anything from spikes to engines and/or assorted gems or other paraphernalia. In addition the chances are quite high that the bones that make up the wings will be highly visible and/or made of metal even if your not a skeleton dragon.

Next up we come to the head area and if your a Yugioh dragon you can look forward to having either some sort of pointy nose protuberance or a large angular chin and/or some sort of spiky looking assemblage of horns or skull extensions. Like the wings chances are you will have at least one gem inset into your head somewhere.

In terms of the body chances are high that no mater if your made of metal, stone or some from of sentient plant you will have an overlapping armoured section somewhere about your person even if its just the tail. Theres also a high chance that this armour will cover your chest and again your likely to be covered in gems, or spikes or some sort of lined area that just so happens to be a complementary colour with the rest of your colour scheme.

Finally if your a fire monster you will either be literally made of fire or your background will make sure that concept is clearly apparent.

Sticking to these principles I worked my way though the Pokemon that would be on the mat. Gradually nudging them more into line with the style we are going for. This Tyranitar for example gets his normally rounded edges made angular with added spikes (1). The various holes in his body get adjusted slightly I wanted those on his legs to be more vent like (2). He already has lines on his chest so we can just extend that element all the way down and along the underside of the tail (3). Obligatory gem in the forehead, the head gets a slight shape change (think Blue Eyes White Dragon) which lets me add the ridges above the eyes (4). Finally we dd a pointy chin and fill the mouth full of needle like teeth (5).

When i was finally done with everyone I had a large pile of sketches that could be scanned in and added to the background design.

Gestalt mode.

The next phase was slightly complicated by, as you may have noted, the fact that the various combatants are mostly fighting within elemental groups, if your aligned with the ice element for example chances are your over in the glacial area mixing it up with other of your kind. It took some time to move things around scale and flip them until i was happy with how everything was looking, just play around in your image editor of choice moving layers about until you get things roughly how you want them. Next up we print the resulting image out and redraw the whole thing in an attempt to make sure the various characters looked as if they were in the space rather than pasted on top. which as it happens is the main downside to this approach.

A few more passes between the computer and physical sketching and finally I had the design laid out on the mat. I could finally start on the colouring.

You've got a point.

My comment about pointillism last time wasn't just a throw away remark.After initial colour being applied to the background i spent a great deal of time drawing dots all over it to add an element of texture. The benefits are that you have more control of the flow of the materials if your only applying tiny dabs. On the other hand you do have to be a bit careful of RSI, not so much on individual projects but if pointillism is your whole deal then yeah get a wrist brace or something I guess. The trees were done in much the same way, darker dots were set down and then a lighter colour was applied over the top to give the impression of depth.

The design probably doesn't need trees and houses but they help to tell the eye what the scale is, much like the Pokemon in the background work a bit like scale birds, the artist is trying to show the audience that something is big by showing them something they should know the size of to compare it against.The use of little dots also extends to the reflections in the water and some of the scale textures on the dragons themselves. I'm not sure of the likelihood of doing an entire mat this watt though.

Blue is the new orange.

For once we also have a blue sky, mainly due to the fact orange and green were off the table because of the colours I had already used in the image. The way it lightens towards the center is mainly an attempt to draw peoples attention inwards, while the creatures are roughly placed in a spiral the main layout is just a straight rule of thirds grid.

Once the main colouring is done I work on the spell effects which in this instance is mainly just the ice beam attacks so thats quite straightforward, even if it does seem a bit unfair Trishula gets three beams to everyone else's one. all that done its time to seal it and we are done.

For a few dragons more.

If this mat doesn't turn up i will likely be called on to create a second version which will be interesting since I don't normally do repeats. Luckily I tend to keep all the working files and materials involved in a mats production so I wont have to start over from scratch. It will be interesting to discuss what changes and differences there are between the two images so that will be fun. As to why I call it the Blackflame mat thats mainly due to the fact Horus breathing fire seemed like he was one of the inspirations behind the who project.

Next time either skeletons or more Pokemon. Until then keep your style guides handy.

Oshawott Pokemon Custom Playmat

Most people tend to avoid adding text to their designs if possible, you may have noticed I'm something of exception in that regard. Most people also tend to avoid card zones too and today, along with talking about the latest Pokemon mat I'm going to talk a bit about why that is. I will also spend some time talking tangents and for once it wont be of the aside variety. 

Coming straight out of working on the Bulbasuar mat next up is, another Pokemon mat, but thats ok I'm in the zone right now and how can you get tired of drawing the little yellow guy? 

Oshawott, however, is the star of this design. On top of that, to keep me on my toes since this mat will end up being a birthday present for someone who's quite new to the game and needs a little helping hand, it was going to require card zones.

Have you seen Pokemon card zones? they take up a fair bit of room.

But lets not worry about that for now I say to myself you have a design to do after all. First up I decide it needs to be something lighthearted, Pokemon doesn't generally lend itself to dark and gritty in any case but there was a definite emphasis on keeping it fun. 

From there design evolved out of the idea of Osawatt holding up his shell triumphantly at the center of the image and design wise everyone else just sort of fell into place around him. I also wanted them to have something of the look of a pile of stuffed animals. That said it was quite tricky to get Squirtle to look right sitting down, I'm not sure its an easy pose for a turtle. There was also something of an incident involving Pikachu's feet, originally he didn't have any, which was fine but by the time I got to colouring the shadow under everyone it didn't look quite right, almost as if he was sliding off the edge of the page.

Additionally for this project I set myself the goal of attempting to avoid tangents, I might talk a bit more about them in a separate post down the line but the short of it is in areas where 3 lines intersect it can make the objects involved look as if they are connected in some way they actualy arnt, an illusion of sorts that is best to try and avoid.

Its relatively straightforward for me to adjust the image to weed them out due to the current way I go about designing mats which involves at least 3 revisions. I bring the topic up however because having done my best to remove them then  I went about adding the card zones.

Which were rectangles with straight edges, threatening to create tangents with the background all over the place.

For the most part I managed to avoid adding too many. You can see that the zone over the shell very deliberately avoids hitting any corners of the surrounding image. The nearest being where it goes over his ear. It was fortunate in a way that so much of the design is made of soft curves, had there been a majority of straight lines like exist in Pikachu's tail it may have been more awkward.

Having placed the first zone you now get to the second major issue with them, making sure they are aligned correctly with the mat and each other.

It's not easy, its time consuming and can end up looking wrong if your not careful. Thankfully there is a way to make your life a tad easier and it involves the use of something most people have loads of. I'm talking of course of spare cards and in this instance far from being useless they come to the rescue. For example why do the zones start 4 inches up from the bottom of the mat? Its because I laid out real cards in that space and remembered that some people like to rest their forearms on the mat so I made sure there would beenough space for that. The zones are also the same distance in from both sides and the the discard and deck piles are where they are also because I was able to play with physical cards moving them about until it looked right.

Finally once thats all sorted you have to make sure people can tell where the zones are, an outline helps and here Ive gone with brown because it shows up the best across the most colours in the mat but I have also made sure to leave the areas inside the zones a few shades lighter than the surrounding image to make it look like they are semi transparent shapes that sit above the image and knock some of the colours out of it. 

So the reason people avoid zones? Beside's the fact that you may want to paly other games on the mat obviously. Mainly because they cause so much extra planning, checking and re-checking, and, you know, hide the design which is the thing that, really, when it comes down to it, you want people to see.

I finish things off with a relatively simple background, again full of curves to avoid tangets and add some stars and Pokeballs in order otto give a sense of motion to the whole affair. 

Sneakily two of the Pokeballs just happen to correspond to locations that people typically put gyms and supporters.

A total coincidence you understand. It had nothing to do with not wanting to add even more rectangles to the image.

Next time be prepared to for a trip to the big city.

Bulbasaur Custom Playmat

Its quite easy to find yourself stuck in a specific style as an artist, of course theres noting wrong with having a recognisable or signature style it helps brand recognition, that said its worth remembering to push yourself outside your comfort zones from time to time.

So when a mat design comes along that is, for the most part, quite straightforward ('draw Bulbasuar') its a perfect opportunity to test things out and in this instance I wanted to try blending to black.

I don't tend to go that dark in my usual style, or rather, when blending colours tend to stick to lights and shades of those and then add any black elements afterwards. So in this instance instead of stoping at the darkest green I had I decided In would go right on though to black.

It took quite a while to get there though, and the end product is quite different to the various times a stopped and thought 'is this dark enough?' Especially since the first iteration I though was finished was more of a pastel image. In any case by the time I got to this final version it was apparent I would have to stop soon, the layers of colour may be quite thin by themselves but after so many passes of various greens some blues to bring the shade back more in line with Bulbasaur's usual colour and the black on top of all that, certain areas were becoming particularly saturated and resistant to further colouring and brush movement. 

In terms of materials used its quite an expensive technique to achieve but I think its worth it for the end result. I am however unsure of how well it would work on smaller figures - that will have to be the next test most likely. The sky I decided to keep quite simple while feeling in the mood to draw clouds the two tone nature came about both as a nod to the games Red and Blue (since Green is represented by the Bulbasaur itself) and because having a completely monotone sky would have been a tad dull. While the horizon line is clearly the line of grass at the bottom, the edge of the orange clouds slightly below the center line of the mat also serves to make the character look closer / taller as if they are standing on a vast grassy plain extending into the background.

The fact that the grass means I don't have to draw one of the back legs is also quite useful, you shouldn't be able to see it in this pose anyway but had the ground not been so close to Bulbasuar's body the brain may have expected to see it.

Thats the other thing about learning new techniques, its not just about acquiring new skills but about finding ways to use the ones you have more efficiently, I'm sure, for example, now I know how to use this style I will be able to further refine it and use less materials.

Pokemon Team Custom Playmat

So where was I, ah yes orrery's. I've spoken a number of times about the various layouts you could use to help you create more interesting images from the golden ratio to the rule of thirds but sometimes you just want to base your layout on  mechanical devices that attempt to represent how the solar system works.

No? Just me then.

It almost didn't work, or rather had one of the Pokemon been different it may have been a totally different picture. Having both snake looking Pokemon to balance each other out turned out to be quite a major aspect of the design.

Similarly my original concept had much more of a mechanical clockwork theme I had intend to have all  the characters inside circles with the background full of cogs and other mechanical designs. However when the circles had been dawn out it became apparent that the background was going to end up larger than the characters, and since they were the main focus, that probably wasn't the right way of doing things. 

After much thought, something I did notice however was that the circles were about the right size and spaced far enough apart that they could be used to place the head of the Pokemon and the bodies would fit in around them, there wouldn't be any need to have background elements because somewhat magically all the characters filled the space pretty much perfectly. 

Not that the circles themselves were particularly easy to draw in the first place. its one of those times you wish you had bigger plates, or a large compass posibly like one you would find on a wooden sailing vessel (theres something of a old school navigation theme running though is project I'm now noticing). In the end I had to settle for a large amount of measuring with a ruler, a looped piece of string and a pencil, for anyone tempted to try this at home the string should preferably not be elasticated it tends to throw the measurements out which in turn means you have to spend more time measuring.

Having the starting circles placed it was then a matter of arranging the characters and as I say they came together rather easily. Possibly this was in part due to the fact that the question 'where should each go?' was answered with 'well similar colours opposite each other obviously' when theres only two yellow objects in the image clearly my brain felt having them next to each other would imbalance the whole piece, since the rest of me agreed the drawing process could begin.

I'm terms of colouring, having recently bought  new black colour and remover I promptly managed to use both up again on this project. I especially like the way the lighting effects seem to decrease as they move out from the center, the effects on Steelix also came out particularly well I also feel.

I've drawn Pikachu a large number of times now to the point where I can draw him/her from memory and each time he/she seems to be enjoying themselves quite a lot, by the looks of things this mood seems to infected the rest of the team in this image.

Then again I don't suppose theres much call for grimdark Pokemon

Untill next time, Pikachu (and friends) I choose you (to explore the solar system).

Shiny Metagross Custom Playmat

For some reason everyone seems to be obsessed with Pokemon at the moment, no idea why that would be...

Joking aside this interest in pokemon has also lead to me recently creating a number of mats on this theme and so today I'm going to talk about the adventures of Shiny Metagross.

Our tale starts with a large blank sheet of paper, a rather large collection of reference pictures sourced from the internet of both shiny and not so much Metagross's (Metagrosi?) and a stack of small initial sketches. The large piece of paper is blank because we have realised two very important things the first being that Metagross, shiny or otherwise is constructed out of a set of shapes that seem specifically designed to thwart attempts at dynamic poses, and the second being that we need to somehow make him look dynamic while both making sure he doesn't look like he's about to fall over and at the same time get as much of the body as possible to fit within the dimensions of a playmat.

Much drawing and erasing later and we come to the final large scale sketch, I have also come to the conclusion that Metagross could do with an extra joint on each arm. Which would explain why he's not typically depicted doing things such as running and in general doesn't seem to move much, when you have ball joints at your hips / shoulders and either a ball or hinge joint halfway down each arm / leg, well your not going to be participating in many Olympic events is all I'm saying.

But then when your previous evolutions can levitate maybe walking isn't something you even bother with, and psychic is probably your answer to everything.

Next up the sketch gets a quick pass through your image editor of choice. At this stage we are just trying to make sure the person who has requested the design can see something that makes sense. We could just send them the image of the sketch but by throwing in some quick colour everyone gets a better idea of the 3D space the character occupies.

You can see by the time we get to the finished mat I have taken the ground level out. The main reason being it creates an artificial horizon line at the bottom of the image since I'm planing to have the background "sky" be quite dark and abstract I want to avoid a situation where people get a weird feeling that there should be some sort of landscape there instead, which in turn would have led to things like buildings and trees or rocks or a stadium but with Metagross insistent on taking up as much real-estate as befits his shiny metal self those things will either end up mostly off the page (trees would just be trunks for example) or very small making Metagross look even bigger, like he was some giant alien stomping across the landscape.

Who knows maybe Metagross is in to that sort of thing, mine from Sapphire probably would have enjoyed it, more than battling electric fish at least anyway.

So you have been staring at your image for some time now with Metagross staring back and you like it but there are still one or two little things you want to change. so we flip the image and we find that yes the right back leg doesn't look anything like the left back and its a little to close to the body and the head is also not quite right. which makes it time to start cutting the image up and pasting the individual sections on different layers so we can mess about with their placement. We will also use the liquify tool to nudge sections around to get the shapes we want.

When Metagross is finally looking how we want him we go back to black and white, save the file, and can start on the mat itself.

On the colouring side of things I was trying to make sure there was a definite rocky metallic feel to the piece. I also changed the rocks slightly when I started on the final design since thats was the fist point at which I decided which direction the light was going to come from and in the design the sides of the rocks facing the viewer were a little all over the place. The psychic effects linking the rocks and giving them a sense of motion / direction around the image were the finishing touches to the peice.

And thats how Shiny Metagross went from sketch to sketch to more sketches and finally a finished mat 

Metagross, looking sharp, smashing rocks or any fool who gets in his way, and using psychic to move cause Metagross aint no chump who wastes time or energy walking.

Still not  O.P as an electric fish though...   

...even if Metagross seems to have Mr T's voice

Rescue Rabbit Evee Alters

It has been quite hectic of late and I haven't had time to really sit down and write as much as I would like. Which is a bit of a shame as what I want to write will hopefully be quite substantial, in the mean time while I figure out those posts here are a pair of Rescue rabbits dressed as Evee from pokemon.

I think the most surprising thing was that Rabbits pose is so close to Evee's default, the only slight issue being the shape of the ears.

I was tempted to go crazy with background glazes but in the end decided to just add metallic highlights to some of the high points on the characters themselves to help tie them in with the background.

Zoroark Gamemat

I like orange sky's, just saying.

Perhaps I should back up a bit, so when this request came in it was actually part of a pair, not literally connected (although that may still happen) but two people who wanted Pokemon mats at the same time both featuring Zoroark although from there the details diverged. Anyway I haven't had a chance to do the companion piece yet so this one will have to stand on its own for a while.

Which it does quite nicely, with its bold, bright, rich colours.

If you look back thought the game mat posts you will notice that the quantity of white in the designs has been steadily decreasing, at the beginning with the twilight mat things are quite washed out as I leave plenty of white space as highlighting, as I have improved and found new techniques that style has gradually been replaced by more complex lighting and stronger colours. 

A bunch of new types of inks helped things along as well.

In any case I did go a bit over the top on this one, it probably wasn't necessary to lay down a ground layer then render every blade of grass individually (decreasing in size as they moved back). As for the sky well I did briefly contemplate a blue one but these was just something about that colour choice that bugged me and wouldn't let me do it, then add in that around where I live on a clear sunny evening (on those few occasions when its not damp and overcast)  the sky will  generally be a blaze of pinks and oranges, well they do say write what you know.

Though this is slightly out of sequence, there was a mat produced before this one that started me down the path of orange sky's and you will start to notice that trend over the coming posts. 

As for the characters I really wanted an action shot, Pokemon should be doing stuff. Getting the angle right took some considerable time, the body was always fine, but the number of head designs I went though was quite high. Theres some slight optical trickery involving the back legs but without them he looked as though he was flying and that wouldn't do either.

Lets end today with a making of video of the mat, similar to the Inzector mat I go though the varaios stages that lead from blank mat to finished design.