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

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.

Fullmetal Alchemist Custom Playmat

Its been a bit hectic of late and other projects had taken me away from mats for a bit. So, before I start talking about the more recent mats lets get another of the earlier ones I have yet to talk about out of the way.

You can see what I'm going for here, trying to keep the style similar to that of the animation, the fact that its not as bright as digital animation would be works out quite well since the scene is meant to be more sombre and overcast. I had wanted to get the outline of a city in the background but the fact that they are at the top of a hill and the perspective would have looked weird in the end made me decide against it.

Still if I was doing the mat now I would definitely push the shadows more, possibly even to the extent of having shadows from the trees canopy fall on the characters. I would still probably leave the rain out though, the amount you would need to make it look right would most likely make the design far to busy, although it might have been nice to try and make the characters look slightly damp or have water running down the case or something.

On the subject of the sky there was rather a great deal of grey that went into the production of this design, to the point where having just bought a new set of grey colours I managed to use them almost all up, playmat's are surprisingly large spaces and take a considerable amount of colour to cover. You could use less of course and have white areas showing but then the mat tends to get dirtier faster.

Most of the time I will add black lines around the elements of the image partly because it makes the whole thing pop and partly because the colours don't tend to hold hard lines by themselves. Sometimes this isn't appropriate though and what an image really wants is no outlines or ones in a different colour the final pieces that use this style always seem to me to give off a different atmosphere to the other mats I have done.

Next time, who knows, perhaps I will talk a bit about making custom tokens, everyone on the internet likes cats right?

Hunders Custom Playmat

You can tell this is another 2013 mat, partly due to the artistic style but mostly due to the 'cinematic' bands at the top and bottom: 'Coming to a theatre this fall, when was the last time thunder hurt anyone?'

It definitely caused me some Issues though, at the time the cards weren't even out yet over here and I'm not sure that they had english names either both of which made finding info about them quite tricky.

In the end I looked to the manga for inspiration this had the added benefit of providing a more detailed look at their costumes, personalities and some additional poses something you cant always guarantee being able to have available when working with Yugioh creatures. Having more viewpoints to work from when examining characters is always a plus, especially since there is quite a lot of Yugioh art with some really weird poses or foreshortening that can leave things looking very odd.

Speaking of which, ugh Utopia's card is a pain to work with, dynamic sure but where are his legs? Not to mention the fact his sword blocks half the art. It was again quite lucky that there were other views of him - being the signature creature for a series tends to help in that regard. The shape and position of the horns on his helmet can also cause weird effects, they were one of the elements that it took me the most time to get looking accurate since he seems to be built of quite a number of convex and concave surfaces that at first glance don't tend to make a lot of sense at certain angles. Starliege wasn't quite so bad, his left leg is a bit odd but at least all the major detail is clearly visible on the card, and he has the added benefit of looking like something out of Tekkaman Blade.

Being thunder themed creatures they obviously have electricity effects (should be sound themed really I would have thought) and that gets reflected in the mats background, the angle the photo was taken at also lets you see hints of the white effects on the characters that also have feature lighting style effects, although these shift depending on your viewing angle.

My favourite element though, and something i wasn't even sure would work, is Starliege's sword. Getting it to look transparent was somewhat nerve racking as you slowly build up and mix colour.