MTG Honored Hydra Embalm Token Sock Hydra

Sometimes people ask you how you come up with your ideas. obviously if your doing something based on guidelines that's easy but what about the rest? Well I can't say i have the answers to that, sometimes neurons fire combining various streams of thought and you end up with hydras made out of socks. It seemed to make sense at the time. The light is really what makes this piece for me, there's an almost realism that's just not quite there but is enough to cause you to stop. I think blurring the background helped too. The other ting that this did was inspire a series following the same theme but those can be for another time. 

And at least we finally know what happens to all your lost socks.

Cardfight Vanguard: Double Sided Power Marker Tokens

Last time I mentioned we were going to take a look at digital art in this installment. I originally had another piece in mind however I think this is a more interesting story so today we are going to look at a set of six images that make up three double sided foil Cardfight Vanguard power level markers.

We will be exploring the concepts behind each pair and looking at how I took those concepts from initial sketch to final piece.

!. Setting the Scene.

Three foil tokens, double sided, with six unique pieces of art.

The three pairs will consist of:
Ichigo & Kenpachi (From the anime Bleach)
Deadpool & Judge Dredd
Nero & Dante (From Devil May Cry 4)

The Characters on the left will represent 5,000K and those on the right 10,000K.

It's, a lot of work to be honest. Not only do I have to create six images I have to develop a way of making two sided foil cards and sure it's just sticking two regular cards together but the important part is making sure they are the same size. We wont go into that today but like many of the challenges I'm set this one definitely resulted in a number of improvements to my process.

2. Whats the Story.

On top of all that I wasn’t just going to draw six characters with no thought of where they are or what they are doing. Each pair would be a story and the set as a whole would be tied together by an overarching theme.

And! Just to complicate things further each pair would use a separate art style but a not completely unrelated colour pallets.

As with many card game stories these are ones of power and conflict. Easy for people to quickly understand, which is good since I have two panels to explain everything. We aren't expecting to squeeze Shakespeare on here.

3. Ichigo vs Kenpachi.

This pair's conflict is a head on collision both combatants rushing towards the viewer and each other.

Ichigo's pose came quite quickly, I've drawn him before after all. 

I'm going to be sketching all of these characters digitally, there will be no paper involved in this process. This has been made possible mainly due to finally finding a set of digital brushes that allow me to draw and paint as I would with their physical counterparts.

Here in the first image for example I'm using a pen brush, this pair of images will stay close to the anime style these characters come from so I figure I may as well start as I mean to go on. Its sketchy for sure but thats sort of the point and not having to scan anything in means I can rapidly move on to the second phase (making sure the character is actually 3D and sorting the proportions) and the third (blocking in the background)

The first colour pass is all airbrush brush. Not something I use much in the physical world but highly useful here for laying down large areas of colour and smooth gradients. 

At this point the lighting is a bit generic and all over the place something to remember to fix later. We also need to draw more focus to the center of the image and come up with a way to tie the image into Kenpachi's. 

The final piece takes everything we have done so far and refines it. The lines are slimmed down and have weight added and removed (see here for more on that) The light source moves behind the figure so all the highlights and shadows have to move also and all the rocks get lightning connecting them, a hint that something or someone is causing them to be sent in Ichigo's direction. 

Originally the final image had the sunset in the background mirrored in the ocean but it looked rather like he was flying through space so I added a green tinted curve to the lower half suggesting the ground.

In contrast Kenpachi took much longer to pin down. Many sketches using everything from a pencil brush through to charcoal. It was always his sword that was the issue somehow it kept finding ways to escape the page. Like Ichigo the later stages of line-work use the pen brush, there are many types but the one I prefer works much like a cross between a fine-liner and an ink pen, good control with variable width and opacity.

This image was much more traditionally blocked in, flat and with few colours. The ground beginning to break up gives us our connection to the other image but there's going to be a lot of work needed with the airbrush to get from here to the final piece.

Like the other image the light is behind the character. But then it would be the ground has gone all explode'y (technical term) with lightning. I'm really happy with the way the skin turned out on this one the airbrush is very good at skin and by swapping between a very large broad brush and a thin detail one you can build up the image quite quickly. The last thing I did was go back and check my reference, a good thing too because I had almost forgotten the little diamonds and circles on his cloak. It can be the little details that solidify the final image.

4. Deadpool vs Judge Dredd

The Dredd vs Deadpool conflict is one of chaotic irreverence vs stoic order. Dredd looks down out of his image and towards the highway bellow from where Deadpool smiles back up at him, clearly having done something knowing it would wind Dredd up.

This time both sketches start with a blue pencil brush. The blue is a throwback to a time of analog animation but we tend to still use it as it makes it easier to tell original sketch from more finalised work in black. Both sketches are quite close to their final pieces too, not necessarily in terms on exact pose but at least in layout.

I'm going for a graphic novel / western comic style with these two so back comes the pen brush, this time slightly broader and more ink'y to fill in the blocks of black. The Dredd blocking in was essentially a redraw as you can see from the massive jump in detail. The best way to do this is to make the previous image transparent and use it as a guide, that way to can focus on the details.

As you can see there was originally a car in the Deadpool image I dropped it for two reasons. Firstly while the angles were right it was a little flat, it needed to be taller but then would have taken up far to much space. Secondly it distracts from the main image, the white lines on the ground tell us its a road so we may as well remove the car and have the blood splatter more dominant there.

When it came time to colouring once again the airbrush is the primary tool however once we have the initial colours in place I start using a series of pattern brushes to add textures. Deaadpool gets carbon fibre armour for example while I add brick, stone and metal layers to the areas of both images that seem most appropriate. At the same time a gradual process of upping the detail occurs until I'm happy with the results.

5. Nero vs Dante.

With this pair I was trying to capture them mid combo. Originally Dante would have been focused on the right attempting to shoot Nero down but I didn’t like the pose, it seemed odd that he was ignoring , over the course of the sketch it gradually evolved to be front facing and shooting both ways. This probably leaves it the weakest of the connecting stories but it does mean if Nero tries to attack from either side he's getting blasted. Nero's pose changed a bit too, in the end I wanted to have a nice C curve to the pose and the leg on the left was really disrupting that line of motion creating more of an X and a static pose.

Sketching starts out the same way as the previous pair but quickly moves away from lines in favor of a more artistic style. Usually both images would have been done in grey-scale first but for some reason I started in colour on Nero and just kept working that way. It's quicker, you just have to be more aware of you colour choices.

I'm using the finished cards here as the last images because these are the two that needed the most typography work and editing after their images were finished and for that I had to switch to another program where those edits could be made more easily.

Also here's a bonus image of the city background stage for both pieces. 

You cant actually see it on the Nero piece, I pushed it right back to focus on the foreground, but the idea was there would be enough room for both of them to share it.

6. All and Nothing.

With foil being a hard effct to capture here's a quick video of the finished cards. 

As for the link 'that ties them all together? Well I've mentioned it a few times already. Front-Back, Up-Down, Left-Right, yup they are all pairs of directions. Why? Well when your doing double sided cards any Easter eggs should be three dimensional right?

And that's all we have time for today, next time, well we'll see but it's likely to one sided.

Custom Wurmcoil Tokens Haiku

 

Light and Dark in balance.
As coiling snakes like Life(link) and Death(touch).
Wurmcoil tokens painted as one.

Custom MTG Dr Doom and Doombots Zombie Tokens

Things have been rather hectic of late so I thought it would be a good idea to ease back into blogging with a short post about a set of tokens that I have recently created.

I didn't need to, create them that is, not in the sense that their existence was required at least. On another level however it was vitally important that i got the idea out of my head and sometimes the most expedient way of doing so is just to get on and put pen to paper.

Mostly stylus to graphics tablet in this case, then printer to paper, but you get the idea. Like a song that gets stuck in your brain on loop I couldn't stop thinking about how amusing super deformed Dr Doom tokens would be.

Once you have decided to create Doom tokens however the real issue becomes what creature type should they be? The smart money is on looking at the meta and choosing the most used type but there was just something that felt off about doing them as soldiers or warriors, Dr Doom is no measly 1/1. In the end I went with my first choice and zombies it was.

You cant have Doom doing all the heavy lifting though, no he's got a country to run and superheros constantly messing with his schedule. 

He's a busy man so whats needed are some lackeys and if there's one thing zombies do well its numbers. not so much counting mind, more the physical quantity, although in this instance the fact that they are Doombots should mean they have some basic grasp of maths.

I went with your standard old school basic comic Doombot for the rank and file members of the squad because they would be a similar height to Doom himself and would fit the space better. Then brought in the bots from the Fantastic Four: Worlds Greatest Hero's cartoon to act as the heavies and fill out the background. whichever version you go for the important part of making them super deformed is to make the bodies significantly smaller than the head which usually ends up being at least a thrid of the size of the character.

Finish your squad off by splitting them across a series of cards for that added teamwork factor when you play them to the battlefield, add some fancy glows and a bit of depth of field to get more benefit out of the fact your putting them on foil, then all you have to do is set up a sheet of them and hit print.

Well then you have all the fun of craft tools and glue but the drawing part is over at least.

If there's anything that's defined this year so far, aside from the obvious lack of posts, is that things have progressed somewhat, mostly in therms of my own skills,

Its partly why I wanted to start with these tokens, there's just something about the fact that I can now do rounded corners that makes it seem like things are starting to come together, especially when you combine them with the fact I have started adding my own backs.

I wasn't happy with the way the tokens I had been making were a bit on the thick side. While creating a custom back makes the production process more complex, lining everything up and bonding the various layers together can be tricky, but combined with the rounded corners gives a sense of completeness that some of my tokens had been lacking up until this point.

So in a way maybe they did need to exist, it was just one of those moments where everything comes together to make something cool.

karakuri Tokens

This week something a bit different as we take a brief look at some tokens I have recently completed.

Usually for tokens I will work in a vector drawing program, the benefits being that you can scale the graphics to any size with no loss of detail.

This time though I decided I wanted to mix things up and try something a bit different so after drawing the initial sketches by hand and scanning them in instead of opening the vector program I opened a more traditional drawing one instead.

Of course doing it this way means a fixed dpi and since these are going to be printed out the higher the better, on the other hand my Mac is getting on a bit now so lets set it at 600, since thats going to be what the printer outputs it at.

The next step was to paint each sketch in greyscale (it helps to set the pallet to greyscale also so as you don't get tempted to use colour.) Having a graphics tablet is extremely helpful at this point, a mouse isn't exactly the most efficient drawing tools, my particular tablet is essentially 1 to 1 with my screen size but smaller tablets have the advantage of requiring you to move your arm less and are probably the best place to start for new users.

You may be wondering why I chose to do the images in grayscale first rather than jumping straight into colour there are two main reasons.

1. Its quicker: With four images to do and at such a high resolution, limiting the choice of colours cuts out quite a bit of the thinking time involved for both myself and the Mac, with a mild grey laid down I can set  the brush to lighten or darken and then set the opacity and those will be the only tools other than the eraser I will need.

2. It leads to more consistent images; Since I'm essentially building with light is very easy to tell if something doesn't look right and to keep the shading consistent across the whole image. if I was to section each area of the image off based on colour and work on the shading of each area individually theres more opportunity for the shading to differ between areas.

Finally it  means when you do finally add the colour you don't have to mess around with working out what the light dark and mid tone of each colour is and its relation to the other colours in your image all you have to do is paint the colour over the final piece and set the layer properties to colour and the shading will magically appear.

Having coloured and printed the images out I have to apply the image to the foil and in this case I decided to splash out and get something a bit snazzy.

And thats about it, I definitely enjoyed doing the art this way so no doubt I'll do something similar again. Next time we return to your regularly scheduled playmats.

Custom Tokens Anime Cats

While I don't play Yugioh currently I still try and keep up with the general goings on with the game. One of the big things at the moment is that the new banned list brought the number of scapegoats you can play up to max, perhaps I thought people would like goat tokens with a twist?. Combine this idea with the fact I had the materials available to create some i set about creating some myself, in todays post I will look at some of those tokens, talk a little about the thought processes behind the designs, and finish off with a brief look at one of the ways in which you can go about making tokens.

We will skip over the first two sets I created for the moment and move strait on to look at wave 3 because lets face it this is the internet and therefore all about cats. Or in this instance creatures that are at least in part cat, as much as a pair of cabbits/bunnycats, a cat thats a witch and Catbug can be at least.

By this point in the process I have also refined my technique, ironed out many of the problems that I encountered, and ditched the custom template I had spent quite some time on, since theres something to be said for nice clean designs that can be used not just as goats but as tokens in any game. 

I also wanted to try and make sure the tokens express at least a little of each of the series styles in their designs while still trying to maintain some sense of a group. 

A task made slightly more difficult with Ryo ohki since I had drawn the original image some time ago and the Bleach hat isn't exactly cannon. The carrot background helps quite a bit in that regard but it still feels as though it falls slightly outside the style of the other 3, possibly because the others use up more of the cards area.

I suppose the Kyubey token could be considered spoilers? On the other hand everyone should know that that particular bunnycat should not be trusted so perhaps its a public service. For this card I wanted to get a sense of the dual nature of what he's offering and the way the witches dimensions tend to be slightly surreal experiences. At the same time you have to be aware that too much detail can cause things to get muddled at this small size so I countered that by using large blocks and keeping the number of colours to a minimum.

Which leads nicely into the other element that I concentrated much of my focus on which was the selection of colours that I used, this was especially important for the blair token since Soul Eater has a very bold bright contrasting colour pallet. I was slightly sceptical of the colour of the pumpkins at first but with the purple background they really make the whole image pop. The basic shapes took some time to build up but the nice thing is once you have one of something you can always create more of it, there were still quite a number of squares to draw though.

Catbug's background by contrast was somewhat more straightforward to create, mostly since the series is likely created in a vector drawing program similar to the one I was using to create all these images. The variable line width black outline is more of a concession to my own persona taste since the show tends to keep its lines very narrow, if it uses them at all.  

Finally for today I will explain the first method people worked out to create foil tokens, its not really a very efficient method and can also be quite messy which is probably why most people have abandoned it but its probably still interesting to learn how people do it, or did it rather.

The first thing your going to need is a supply of raw materials the most important of which are a load of foil cards from the game of your choice. What set they are from actually makes quite a difference, some older MTG cards for example are easier to use than more modern cards, and Yugioh sets are all over the place with their ink quality and resistance to these methods.

After that you will need a way to remove the ink from the cards, you could use an ink eraser but thats hard work and expensive, your could even use glass paper as long as you were careful. Most people went for something a tad stronger and more effective which was another of this methods problems because the substance in question is acetone which isn't exactly pleasant stuff and should be avoided if possible both in terms of skin contact and the air flow of the environment you use it in. 

Which means at this point I add a disclaimer that I don't advise people use this method and do so at their own risk (Seriously its not worth the effort or cost of materials)

In any case you take a cloth add a dab of acetone and carefully rub off the ink on the cards. Even beyond the problems I have outlined thus far you then have to make sure the card doesn't start to get damaged from too much liquid being absorbed and at the same time find a way to prevent stray acetone from getting on any areas you don't want removed, most notably that reverse side.

You will then be left with cards much like those featured above with which you can do as you please.  From here you will want to spend some time on the computer drawing your tokens in your image program of choice you will then take that image and place enough of them to fill an A4 sheet of paper in another file. or perhaps you could paint directly on the card with some form of paint if you wanted.

Finally you will have to print out the images, cut them out, and stick them on the cards except instead of paper you will have printed the file out on some form of transparent material to allow the foil to show though.

You may also notice that your printer cant print white, needless to say this is another slight issue with this method.

From my tone you may have noticed I'm not a fan, still its important to teach people stuff, in that way there are more minds working on the problem and you get new techniques develop.

Next time I should have an actual playmat to look at so join me again then.