Quick Conversions - Tau Hazard VF1 head and Magnets

I havent shown many conversions of late so lets rectify that with a look at a simple conversion I did to my Tau Hazard suit that will act as the team leader. 

Firstly we have the head which has had the crest removed and antenna from other Tau models mounted on the sides in an attempt to give it a similar profile to that of the head of one of the Veritechs from Robotech/Macross. a straightforward conversion whos only real issue is that the antenna in question only face one way so if you want the finished result to look more polished you will have to cut and turn one of them around.

The other main element was magnetising the burst cannons, again a relatively straightforward procedure (best to wear a mask when dealing with resin) in this case made more tricky through the lack of a drill bit that matched the size of the magnet. Obviously having gone though this procedure on 2 other suits as well Forgeworld decided that the other weapon options would come fused to the arm elements, sneaky. Still between the magnets and the metal rod pinning the heads in place it did make the suits much easier to paint, and I can always use the weapons on my crisis suits and one of my tanks which are also magnetised.

Digital Game-Mats

To celebrate the fact that I finaly have a decent graphics tablet, albeit one thats probably 10+ years old, todays post is going to look at some of the digital designs I have done at one time or another.

First up is a pair of designs based on the MTG concept of the red zone (battle area), an image of an adhesive explosive, some text that relates to MFM and is in a suitably Yugioh style font, and in this first image's case a breakdown of the phases that constitute a turn sequence in Yugioh. The main thing you can do digitally thats quite a bit more difficult by hand is all the fancy opacity effects, you can also go back and change things as you like as long as you have them on separate layers. the down side of course is that you have to find someone who can print the thing on the material in full colour, at a reasonable price.

Its sort of a shame that "There is no sub-step four" never became a meme, i could see that text with a little pixelated Honest being quite cool on a t-shirt.

In any case the second version moves things about a bit to feature a full set of card zones. I don't tend to do zones on non digital mats as again they would come under opacity issues and they tend to take up most of the space I would rather fill with designs. The exception to this though is when the overall design calls for them, for example when they themselves can become strong elements of the background design. Or if I was do a Cardfight mat, but even then I think you could replace the zones with other marker elements.

Sometimes I find that ideas just need to be put to paper, or in this case 0's and 1's. At the time I just felt like drawing transformers and this was one of the results. It could probably do with more background elements some sort of vista perhaps but thats the nice thing about digital you can leave things and come back to them much later to change things up or add new ideas. Incidentally I do have quite a cool idea for a new transformers design (non digital) but I have a number of other mats to get out of the way first.

Which brings us back to why I needed a decent tablet in the first place. This particular design reached a point where a mouse just wasn't cutting it (not to mention an obscene file size). Though that is another upside of non digital design, you never run out of space and you can't lose a load of work to a system crash or slowdown.

Inzektor Custom Playmat

The latest mat that I have completed brought with it a host of new ideas and challenges primarily among them was not actually talking to the person who wanted it which was slightly odd as i am used to being able to gage peoples reactions and get feedback from them. 

This mat is also quite deceptive theres quite a bit going on that your meant to discover over time mostly this comes through in the background where the most obvious example would be the hex pattern playing on the idea of a hive but it goes all the way down to the pose the characters are doing. The characters themselves are quite interesting in that their designs are clearly influenced by super hero shows like Karmen Rider which makes me think Konami wanted to make something with a similar feel to E Hero's, just with more internal synergy.

Something I didn't really pay much attention to at the time but the green backgrounds for the equipments were clearly influenced by the cards border colour, not doing the traps on purple was clearly either a missed opportunity or me deciding I didn't want the background to merge to much with the characters, most likely the latter.

The other major thing different about this mat is that during it's production I took pictures of it developing so heres a video created using those images.

Though I could do with some way to suspend my camera/phone above the mats so it stays in the same place :)

Lightsworn Game-Mat Concept

Something a bit different today as we delve into a look at how I design mats. This particular design was originally done for the owner of the Bleach mat but was never taken past the design stage.

Which is a bit of a shame really because it was one of the most complex and time consuming designs to do, just figuring out how to fit everyone in was quite tricky and several of the characters took multiple revisions before getting to this final point. working at actual size is vital for something like this, trying to do all the characters separately and then compositing them all in later culd have worked but wouldn't have led to such an integrated image.

Unfortunately Lightsworn arnt a popular deck at the moment so this design is unlikely to see a full colour version for the foreseeable future.