Bleach Game-Mat

I got the impression that the person I did this mat for would quite like to see it on the site so here goes.

While the Star Wars mat took black ink to the extreme my current trend of trying to make the mats a bit more bold really started with this project. Here I am still a bit tentative with the use of the black preferring to let the greys do most of the heavy lifting shading wise on the clothes, mainly because the black was the first colour i laid down and wasn't sure at the time how dark the rest of the image would end up, and I really wanted the characters to pop.

Which is how the background came about, going for fresh vibrant colours in large solid blocks was an attempt to replicate the cool contemporary stylings of the series first intro. Whenever i see the mat in person the bright green always makes me smile, theres just something about the way it looks that makes me think 'good choice' when i think back to how originally those sections were going to be yellow,. 

Compositionally like many of my pieces theres a major spiral theme going on, I just like vortexes it seems.

Ponder - Tempered steel deck alter

This ponder is relatively straight forward as the vast majority of the extension will be a dark purple/ black colour so theres not much to say about this image, the other way to go would be to totally change the image but thats not what the owner was after. the ponder with the menfolk on it on the other hand is a totally different matter altogether.

MTG Alters Sorin & Sacred Foundry

The second more up to date project I will be looking at today is a pair of MTG alters.

The sacred Foundry actually went quite a bit more smoothly than I had anticipated as orange and yellow tend to be a pain to work with especially when it comes to colour matching. Sorin on the other hand was quite a different beast. Having not worked on a Planeswalker before i was a little hesitant at first this quickly faded as i worked on the card. Of more interest was the fact that i began altering without looking at a larger version of the original image.

This led to some interesting assumptions on my part the biggest of which leading to me adding a river to the bottom right of the image, theres also a second volcano in the original art that seems to have been cropped from the cards art. Finally finding a version of the original made the whole composition make more sense and i added all the trees that had been missing from the left hand side including the very large one that I had assumed was just some sort of billowy cloth. on the right i added a forest as i felt the mountain looked a bit on the bear side. Was my original version any less right than what i ended up with? probably not but i am glad I did add the trees to the left the autumn colours and the shapes add quite a bit to the image, the rivers still theres though meandering its way behind the trees.

Star Wars Game-Mat

We are jumping ahead a bit here to some things I have just completed, starting with my latest playmat.

This was definitely one of the trickier ones I have had to do for two main reasons firstly that the person who asked for it is a major Star Wars fan, to a point where he even had his own shop selling Star Wars stuff at one point. This meant I knew that things had to look right, attention to detail was going to be a major point in the design.

Secondly he wanted it dark, like really dark, thats actually more of a problem. The issue here is that while the black ink looks black on paper the material used to make the mats tends to absorb a lot of pigment meaning even the extra black pen i bought with something like this in mind tends to dry a bit grey. There was clearly no option then, i would have to cheat.

By which I mean try and fool the eye, which is why the background is two layers of blue with a layer of black sandwiched in between and a sprinkling of other hues to add depth here and there. Also why lord Vader is lit up as he is (we assume his lightsaber or other dark side force powers are just off screen)

All the messing around with lighting effects did give me the opportunity to avoid using outlines for the most part which was a nice change from the usual cartoon style art I tend to work with. The most difficult choice however was what colour to do the stormtrooper? From a purely lighting based standpoint he should have a much greater amount of green on him, on the other hand the white helmet is both iconic and something people expect. Sometimes when you are doing these projects you have to ask yourself what other people will say when they see the piece for the first time and I would prefer it to be wow thats cool rather than why is that trooper green?

These mats do use quite a lot of colour and rather unsurprisingly this particular one went through a vast quantity of black, also noteworthy is that while doing reserch the majority of images i found of Fet had him standing rigid looking forward or casually to the right, hardly very dynamic or fitting for someone who's ment to be this amazing bounty hunter.