infernity Infect Game-Mat

When one person asks if you can do an image for someone else, say for a birthday, it then becomes an amusing game to try and find out what that person would like without tipping them off, as you can see from this mat what that person was into at that time was infect cards from MTG and infernity from Yugioh.

The first job on this mat was posing Glissa as I wasn't really a fan of one of her arts and didn't feel the sitting pose was all that interesting from the other. That done it was time compose the full image and once again I have gone with the trusty spirals, I'm even noticing an even larger vortex now that I look back at it that I didn't see before. The scales of each character really dictated their placement, Blightsteel is huge so unless he wanted to only partially be in the image he was going to have to stand at the back.

The blending on Glissa's armour is also one of the first times I was tempted to be a bit loser with the colours than the typical cel shaded look, I have come quite a long way from there to the mat I have just finished with doesn't use fine-liners, not that theres anything wrong with them but it was something I had been meaning to try for some time, but more on that another time.

Glacial Fortress - Tempered Steel Deck Alters

Time for another card from the Tempered Steel Deck and this time its one of the two nonbasic land.

One thing you have to be very aware of when altering other people's art are the dimensions the original piece was created in, additionally there is usually some cropping when the art is added to the card frame which can throw things off slightly too. this is important because if your not careful you can lose the focus of the work. For example there are many very accomplished lightning bolt extensions of the most recent art, the problem is while they add some very nice looking mountains suddenly the image just looks like a basic land with some fancy lightening.

The same thing applies here I could have extended the rocky icy downwards but this image is all about the sheer scale of the monument, your meant to be starting up at this imposing barrier towering above you. That said looking back at it now I would probably add subtle hints of rocky structures a bit further down, dark but another to blend it in a bit more.

Vampire Game-Mat

I think my favourite requests are the ones I would have never thought about, things that go beyond the obvious. Sometimes you go wow why didn't I think of that and others you go, right hows that going to work. When someone gives you a list of the top 20 to 30 cards from their MTG Commander Vampire deck and asks you to put as many as possible on a mat it turns out to be a bit of both.

In the end I decided the best corse of action was just to represent the creatures and physical objects as spells tend to be a bit random in their tone and are more difficult to get the meaning across. From there it was just a matter of trying to squeeze everyone in while maintaining some from of layout, in this case a large triangle that draws yours focus across and down the design then back up again. I could probably have filled the whole mat with images but sometimes less is more and I really wanted to get some form of skyline in partly to tie the three characters with towers in their are into the rest of the image, partly to get bad moon and the black mana symbol in, but mostly because I didn't want the whole thing to be flesh tones and purple.

Working slightly more loosely with the colours on this one with quite a bit of blending going on the peice only really came together for me once I started working on the little details. this mainly involved the artefacts, finding good places to hide them to be discovered later of choosing suitable characters to hold them. My favourite elements are probably the massive impact that vast area of bright yellow has and the tower the nocturnus is standing in. 

Red Dwarf Custom Playmat

Finding reference material for this mat proved quite tricky, between the fact that the design of the ship has changed and the vast majority of the images come from low res stills most likely taken from VHS  just added to the task of trying to get the faces to look right.

Still I'm quite pleased with the end result, theres a lot more detail in the ships than I was anticipating and I like the way the group pose has come together. The background is another case of the person who asked for the design giving me free rein to come up with anything, and while I was initially worried it would look as though the characters were floating I think in the end I gives an interesting backdrop while helping draw your eye around the design.