Super Sonic, DBZ, Bleach Custom Playmat (Or) Striking a Pose

So you want your image to have some dynamism, the characters to show a bit of movement, something that will be a more interesting than having them face forward and stare out of the image at you. Well today we are going to go though a number of ways I go about trying to achieve that while looking at the Super Sonic mat.

Lets start with Ichigo. The brief called for him to be wearing his final outfit so I need to go away and look at what that outfit actually looks like. After making sure I'm looking at the right one and noting things like the way X's are worked into the design and how the under layer interacts with the top black layer I alsoI notice his sword is quite large so I'm going to have to keep that in mind if I want to get it all on the mat.

So now I know what Ichigo looks like the next thing I need to check is how do people hold swords? its all very well to look at the character your trying to depict but its best to check whats really possible especially if your working with a cartoon character. 

The first technique to improving your characters poses involves running an image search to bring up as many sword poses as possible, depending on the type of sword your tying to depict the search terms might require some finessing but there should be plenty of reference images out there. Take as much information in as possible then start drawing basic figures, stick people will do, just quickly trying out a variety of poses to get a better feel for them.

I've already found poses for Goku and Sonic that I'm reasonably happy with but Ichigo is proving more troublesome. Not because I designed them first or each character separately, everything was done on one sheet together all at once, but because sometimes you find an element or elements that just refuse to come together the way the rest of the image has.

If I'm going to stick to this design he's going to have to fit in the space that is left which in this instance is an L shape.

I draw him charging forward, his head near the bottom of the image, fine but now there's a huge gap at the the top of the page. Next I draw him sword ready to impale the others but now the whole mat is mostly taken up by weapon and Ichigos arms are off the edge. I work though pose after pose trying to find the one that works best but its still not coming together. 

One more quick look though the references I've gathered and I get the idea to flip the image, this gives more more options since now Ichigo's main hand isn't constantly getting in the way of other elements or generally causing me problems but I'm starting to think I need to try something else.

Part 2: In Which You Have To Be Fine Looking Slightly Silly.

I find a toy sword, a large mirror and start looking for poses that might both fit the space I have available and look cool and dynamic. The hard part is that the mirror isn't in the same space I work in and holding a camera and a two handed sword is a rather tricky logistics problem.

What I'm alluding to is this: don't underestimate the usefulness of props when your drawing and don't be afraid to look silly. The internet might give you a general concept but you wouldn't paint a still life without having placed it in front of you or done life drawing without s model so why would you try do any other painting just from memory? Doing the poses yourself also means you can get exactly what your looking for. Here for example after many silly samurai poses I've found a way of positioning Ichigo that fills the space practically perfectly.

Don't have a full length mirror, selfie stick or friend you can talk into posing? All is not lost! It's time to bring out the toys, i mean collectable action figures…

Unit Zero Struts his stuff.

Those little wooden guys you see in art shops are fine and all if you want a blank human-ish form to work from but I find that since they don't stand up naturally, being as they are usually suspended in the air by a metal pole in the back, sometimes its easier to use action figures since they're usually free standing. There are a wide variety of models you could use but the ones I tend to stick with I use because of their range of motion and the way their joints work.

Admittedly if your drawing people robot suits may not be the best choice for accurate limb lengths but this is just an example and Unit Zero here doesn't get out much. We will be using him to get a feel for how foreshortening is going to affect the size of each body part as we move further away from the observer. He's not exactly got the same proportions as Sonic so matching that pose is tricky, especially with massive shoulders, but its not like physics and the way our eyes work is going to be diffrent between them.

Got enough toys, I mean miniature non-living life models, why not set up the whole scene.  Or how about building it all in clay, card or whatever else you have on hand, I watched a program once where they explained how a landscape artist painted said landscapes based on models he built out of things he found around the garden with vegetable trees and the like,

What this all boils down to is that it's much easier to draw something thats in front of you than to have to make everything up from memory. The old masters used to use camera obscures and other clever tools and techniques to accurately transfer a persons appearance to a canvas, admittedly they didn't have distractions like the internet back then either so spent a great deal of time practising too but that's the point I'll be making in a moment the point right now is your brain has a nasty habit of asuming things or downright making stuff up, trust your eyes not what you think you may have seen.

Getting back to the mat. I've drawn Goku before, most notably here in the Scryed mat, having had some prior practice meant I could get his pose relatively easily. It did take a number of passes to figure out how his hair should fall weighing up the factors of anime logic vs wind resistance, gravity, and how the viewers brain thinks things should look. 

We want him to be showing effort, powering up or just about to launch into an attack, a large part of this is going to come from the face so naturally another technique has us spending time making funny faces in a mirror but hey that's what animators at places like Disney do so lets not worry about the people looking at us slightly concerned.

Sonic's pose was even simpler, I used to draw so many of my characters with one leg behind the other way back in the mists of time, Ie like 10+ years ago, you probably could've called it my art style. The tricky bit was getting the foreshortening right and we have Unit Zero to help us there. Sonic's pose is a bit more linear than the others but we are hoping to add some dynamism to it though the slight twist of the body and the way he is reaching forward out of the image.

And Ichigo? Well in the end  I found that holding the sword like that kept it from covering all the other characters. The L shape I have to fit him in means he has ended up attempting to kick Goku, perhaps we could really have done with slightly more mat just to show where the legs are headed a bit more clearly but the upper body always takes precedence when working at this size. Finally while you cant always replicate how the character looks, I wasnt going to be modeling the outfit for example, we still want things to be realistic from experience we know the long fabric of his upper clothes will move in the opposite direction to the one in which he is traveling. 

And all getting the pose right took were a whole nunch of pictures of us posing we will save in a folder for possible later use, just hopefully not by others against us. 

Part 3: In Which I Talk About The Things That Aren't Pose Related But In A Way Are.

The backgroud blends elements from all three charcters respective worlds. Primarily Green Hill zone with king kai's planet and The castle from the ghost city in Bleach. The trick was to make something interesting that wouldn't distract from the rest of the image.  The zone dips in the middle primarily to create a triangular negative space above it that's meant to draw your eyes down from the top corners.

In terms fo the lighting I went really heavy on the highlights this time around. In part due to the fact I didn't just want Ichigo to be a large area of flat black. This led to almost everything including the grass having a line of light running though it and a more realistic rendering of the characters than their typical anime style.

Which brings us to my final point: That above all else, the posing, the setting up scene with models, and all the research, the most important thing is to keep drawing people lots and lots of people, exemplified here by an image showing how the characters looked in two mats from some time ago and how they look now.

Look at the Goku at the top of the image. His pose is very vertically aligned. the line at the center of his chest makes this really obvious. Where as the Goku on on the Sonic mat is built around a S curve that takes that line curves it though the neck and into the left edge of the face. The Ichigo in the top image has a more dynamic pose than the top Goku but could do with one or two tweaks, looking back at him now it sort of feels like his body isn't quite connected up the way it should be, obviously my understanding of anatomy wasn't quite as good back then.

Yes in the end the reality is you gotta just keep drawing stuff, want better poses, draw stuff, more detail, draw stuff, and so on and so forth, it obviously works that last image proves it.

And on that sobering thought thats all I have time for today, next time, Um let me think about that.

The Brotherhood Custom Playmat (Or) Time Management

Welcome to the 100 post, there was cake but we ate it all. 

I could have used this post as a retrospective but we already have three of those Here, Here, and Here, so instead today I'm going to talk about another aspect of entropy, time management. I'm going to continue where we started last time by discussing another instance of multiple copy's of the same mat, in this case the three Brotherhood mats and how I went about making them within tight time limts.


Part Alpha: All the time in the world.

It usually takes me two weeks on average to create a mat especially the more complex designs. A great deal of that time is invested in research and sketching. This discovery phase is then followed by a phase devoted to upgrading the level of detail and generally polishing what will end up as the final one to one scale sketch. Lets say this combined section takes up a third of our production time how do we compress these phases if we are on a tight deadline?

The first option is to get become a better artist, we are on post 100 and there is a definite evolution from the posts at the beginning. Things that would have taken significant time before are now straightforward, ways of working I wouldn't have though of back then have increased productivity, you do anything enough times your going to get better at it just keep practicing.

Have resources already available. I keep just about everything related to each project it all gets filed away just in case I do need it for whatever reason. In the case of the third Brotherhood mat this saved quite a bit of time since I didn't have to go back and recreate content meaning I could just get on and start almost immediately on the real mat. 

Work smarter not harder. This one I find slightly more tricky. Know what your goals are and only do what needs to be done. The best example I can give of this is art coursework - Art being a subjective subject the only way you can be marked fairly against others is if you all have to cover the same points. You could make the most amazing piece of art in the world but if you don't cover, forget, or ignore the requirements laid out in the documentation you could end up scoring lower than someone who puts in very little effort but covers all the bases.

In the case of the first pair of brotherhood mats I had two to three days to get them both done and posted knowing the design brief consisted of the words The Brotherhood on a blue background, and that I had a free reign on the pattern, the quickest and most detailed way to create the design was to do it digitally, the text will be sharper we can play with all the filters and any amendments based on feedback can be made quickly. 

Part Beta: No time like the present.

Having spent a third of our time designing, or in the case of these mats having cut that time right down to something closer to a twelfth or zero for the green one, we now move onto the actual mat phase. This will include applying the design to the material, coloring and line work possibly not all in that order. 

If you don't have a good grasp on your schedule you can end up rushing this phase or at least parts of elements of it. the major time sink is that you have to work up from the light colours to the dark ones and if you rush you can end up losing the lightest areas. the time investment in this phase also depends on the syle your going for, realistic lighting is going to take longer and require more steps than flat shading, detailed line work done at the beginning may need some time allotted to fix up at the end.

When your doing multiple mats all this stuff increases exponentially. One of the reasons for the production line method outlined last time is that its actually quicker than finishing each separately since you always have the colours you need at hand and have to swap back and forth less.

Still, doing the first two mats I found that there was an awfully large area to cover and not a lot of time to do so which sent me down the path of using my secondary medium more than my primary. which was fine because it does cover more quickly but the time you have to leave between applications for it to dry adds up and if I hadn't had two to do, one drying while I work on the other, then it would have worked out slower in the end.

for the third mat I stuck to my primary mostly for that reason and partly since I had quite a lot of green spare and could let it flow without worrying to much about running out. 

It definitely felt like the green mat was progressing faster than the original pair. Even with the tighter deadline, this time a day and a half, I found all I have learned in the intervening time speeding me along. 

The next question was, was it going to dry in time?


Part Gamma: Back to the Future.

On the plus side its not going to take as long as the first pair but we still have to dry the white tendrils and stars. this process can be sped up by using an iron it also helpfully locks in colour and evaporates any excess. This is the final phase of the process and can take anywhere from a few hours to a week, depending on how violent your feeling with the iron, so make sure you plan accordingly. 

This phase is finished with a quick application of protective spray, which again is left to dry, and then its all down to the postman or your own legs depending on the distance.

Taking all this into consideration we have these phases:  
Discovery -> Polishing -> Application -> Colouring -> Final Clean up.

Knowing the projects workflow means we can plan for the time available, cut detail to save time, add a month to discovery to spend in a library researching, spend two weeks painstakingly coloring chameleon scales, or whatever. In the end timescale is just as big a player in the design brief as any other detail, especially when you have to slot projects in next to or around each other and the rest of your life.

What it boils down to is weather or not you can accurately tell how long something is going to take, that's a very useful skill to have. 


Part Epsilon: Like Clockwork.

I'll finish this post with a brief look at the actual design of the mat. 

Much like the Without a Doubt mats the idea its to get them looking as close to the digital version as possible. we also need to make sure the text is as centered as possible so measure measure measure. For the blue pair I could apply thin layers working from the outside in to build up a gradient I also used far too much black grey and blue and could have saved time by removing the grey layer entirely. For the green mat not having to do the initial design again meant I could spend more time pushing the definition up, the fact I was sticking mainly to my primary medium also led to sharper lines. 

One of the main goals of the blue pair was to make them align when placed opposite each other. this is tricky since the 'zones' design runs diagonally and will be flipped when turned around. In the end I added a second set in the background for the other mat to line up their foreground with which gave the design a little more depth. 

The green mat is much the same design wise, as it would be, however there are a number of minor tweaks and improvements to the design many of which strangely came about due to having access to a T Square and drawing board. The plus side of working with the greens is they don't overwrite each other like the blues do on the other hand I couldn't go quite as dark so added some line work to the text.

Well that's been a relatively standard post all things considered. There was going to be fireworks but rain stopped play, just one of those things you can't plan for I suppose. 

And thats all the time was have for this week, until next time I'll leave you with a reminder that there was a very good reason everyone thought Scotty from Star Trek was a miracle worker.

Without A Doubt Gaming Custom Playmat

I don't do a lot of multiples of the same design. That's intentional on my part for a number of reasons but when it comes right down to it the big two are:

A: I want the person I'm making the mat for to know its a one off. Theirs is the the only one in existence anywhere and even if I was to do another design featuring the same set of ideas or characters I would come up with a different image. I realize it's possible this isn't that big a deal consciously to many people but it is important to me and looking at it this way helps make sure I always try and come up with new designs whatever the subject. 

B: Since I'm making these by hand no two are going to be exactly alike anyway, my hand might travel just that tiny bit further, a colour that was mixed perfectly for one might be a shade lighter on the next, or I might have picked up a bunch of new skills or leveled up since I did the original and they may influence how the second version looks (that may actuality be the topic for another upcoming article) If someone wanted twenty of the same mat for example they would definitely be better off with me providing a digital design that could be printed. I mean if someone did want that many mats hand drawn I'm not going to say no, I like a challenge after all, but it might take a while.

So we have established that one off's are in general the rule but like everything in life from time to time rules are meant to be broken, or at least circumnavigated, in this particular instance the brief was to create three mats for members of the 'Without A Doubt Gaming' Guild/Group.

Everything in the design would be the same.

Except the names.

Hey look now the mats aren't identical! Joking aside the design we eventually settled on is quite involved for something I have to draw mostly the same three times, in part 3 I'll talk a bit about how i went about keeping them as similar as possible but first we need to step back a few stages and talk a bit about how we got to this design in the first place.

Part 2: A +2 Bonus to Engineering.

One of the best things about computers is that you can iterate a design and make corrections or changes very quickly. Tweak a colour here, scale a selection there add filters and lighting effects like there's no tomorrow.

Ok you have to be a bit careful with thoes last two or you can end up with a right mess but heck I once wrote a program whose sole purpose in life was to iterate and create variations, its a computers strength is what I'm saying. 

Anyway to the left you can see a collection of variations on the design. The initial brief called for two copy's of a blue logo with yellow text and the players names underneath but just to be on the safe side, and because I'm not the biggest fan of mirroring, I provided this set of designs to be reviewed.

I had a feeling the fourth one down would get picked, you start to get an intuition about these things after a while, its either that or certain sketches universally resonate with people above and beyond all the other choices they are presented with.

The version of the design locked in there was only one thing to do before starting to work in the physical world. go back to yellow text, since it makes the design easier to read and stands out more and then start wishing I hadn't come up with something so very digital looking.

Ok that's two things but take a look at a larger digital version of the final design here on the right. I have to take something created by firing photons towards your eyes with its tiny curvy lines and large amounts of text and make that to look as close to the same as possible on canvas using a medium that gets darker the more you add and has a number of limiters on how small you can go, there's a reason most people hand drawing mats avoid doing text.

And I've got to make three of them. 

Like I said I like a challenge.
 

Part 3: Build Macros to Save Time on Repetitive Actions.

The first thing to do is get the design down on the mats themselves this will usually involve pencils. You could use anything that will mark the material but keep in mind for this design we are looking for precision.

It's best to get all the details that stay the same between mats down first and then draw in whats different. We don't want things changing scale or position just because our eyes are thrown off by the placement of an 'o' on one mat that isn't there on another. We also do them all at once before starting coloring because the best way to keep them similar is to take it steady and do each stage on each mat before moving onto the next thing, We don't want to suddenly find we are out of black because we have finished one mat and the other other two are three stages behind for example.

It also helped that I marked out a grid on both the design and the mats beforehand and to make even more sure the names have placement marks built into their design that will be covered by colour.

I mentioned photons earlier. Digitally it doesn't really matter which way around I work, especially with vectors, but in real life if I were to lay all the black down first I would have a hard time getting back to the lighter ones. 

Which is a bit of a shame since its the colour that covers the greatest area and if i got that out the way early things would certainly take less time. Instead I stared with a pale yellow, like I often do, and blocked in the bright areas move to the next mat repeat and ditto for the last, an added benefit is that if there are any deviations between the pencil lines, say some aren't as easy to see as on another mat, you tend to find yourself using what you know from mat 1 to inform how you colour number 2 and that combined knowledge helps with 3.  

Then you move up through the yellows and the oranges, the greens and light blues and you find that along the way there's a rhythm to the colouring that plays repeats, repeats, then begins again. the images begins to tighten up, you add the reds and dark blues with little fuss because you know where everything goes now and then finally you have to add the black.

At which point the game changes and now I'm playing match the light area with the corresponding dark space. It wasn't even something I had considered while designing just one of the pitfalls of using filter effects you could say because when it came time to add the black I suddenly realized that every light area had edges that butted up against a dark one.

What could have been a simple fill in the blanks now turned into a practical tutorial on how light works I would add black, check the original image, make sure the edges lined up, add some more black, push the edges to meet where they didn't, refine lines where I needed extra sharp definition, and make sure I remembered what I had done on one mat to repeat it on the next.

Finaly I add the curvy lines in and these I do use a lighter colour to go over the black with because while it requires more brute force it gives a finer line.


Part 4: Server Down for Maintenance.

Admittedly not the clearest of images, since finding space to lay out all three next to each other and having a high enough resolution is tricky, this should still hopefully show how close the three final mats are to one another. That being said each does have its own personality and quirks just by virtue of the order I was creating them in and becuase they are hand drawn.

Since I did each step on the same mat first every time it became the most spontaneous, one of the other two has more red and blue mixed with the black its slight but adds a minimal temperature variance, the third obviously benefits from the things i learned from doing the other two. There are no doubt countless other little things like that which make each mostly the same but still very individual.

So yeah sometimes breaking the rules leads you down new paths, it certainly seems to have improved my concept of light and dark with has been handy subsequently.

That's just about all I've got space for today, until next time try and make the mass produced unique. 

Nekoz Custom Playmat (Or) Overcoming Mental Blocks

Some projects have you fired up and ready to go as soon as you hear their details, the flip side however is that sometimes you can find yourself lost on how to move things forward. In todays post I'm going to cover mental blocks or a lack of desire to create and then cover some ways in which you might overcome them.

Part 1: The Problem.

Two designs came in at almost the same time. The difference was that while I had a pretty good idea of how I was going to go about doing one the second just eluded me. As I worked on the first I mulled the problem over, why was it that I was putting off starting the second? What was it about the brief thats was leaving me cold?

There are any number of reasons why you might feel apathetic towards a project but as the first design drew to a close it became more and more obvious that the reason I wasn’t overly eager to start on the next was because I had absolutely no idea of what it should look like.

Drawing a blank so to speak.

Nada.

Zip.

Thats sorta an issue when your whole deal is drawing stuff. If it helps imagine it being in the same vein as writes block theres a blank sheet of paper staring up at you and you have to fill it with words or in this case an image but it just stays blank, a reflection of the lack of concepts in your mind.

We have to be professional about this though, theres no option not to do it, isn’t one of my sayings that I can and will draw anything? Just starting into the void isn’t going to get us anywhere its time to take the fight in other directions.

Part 2: Working Around the Block.

1. If we cant get over the problem its time for a flanking manoeuvre and in the case of drawing stuff that means, well just draw a load of stuff. It doesn’t matter so much about what your drawing as long as you start, although its probably useful if you start drawling things related to the topic your focussing on.

2. Do more research, find cool stuff on the internet or in books. We tend to limit ourselves to small islands of the internet, perhaps its time to follow a few links and wade out into new territory, let inspiring things you find and see refill your creative tanks.

3. Doing a large amount of anything can wear you down. perhaps you need to take a break. Or change mediums for a bit, assuming you don’t have writers block perhaps you should do some creative writing.

So lets see has any of that helped do I know what I'm going to do yet?

Nope.

Dang it.

Part 3: Resolution.

In the end the solution hit me like a mortar while I wasn’t even looking for it. Which in many ways makes the previous section seem less than helpful, still I was doing something else entirely or rather sitting outside not really doing much of anything when it hit me so lets count that as number 3 and press on.

Part 4: The Hook.

That was it then, out of the blue I had the hook I needed to hang the whole thing on and we were off and motoring the brain flips back to 'extremely interested in working on this' mode and the mental block or whatever it was is routed.

Telling a story is just as important in images as it is through words, one of the big reasons I couldn’t decide where the design was going was because I couldn’t see the story. Why are the characters doing what they are doing how does that influence the composition, the poses or the choice background? I didn’t know, which creates concern or worry, in extreme cases you could stop being able to create at all having become so consumed by fear of the blank page.

Sitting there not really thinking about anything I finally realised what the hook was. These characters whole thing is the fact they are dressing up as other monsters the Yugioh worlds equivalent of cosplayers but what about the original creatures their costumes were based on what did they think of this? Where were they?

Well it could be that this is monster hunter and...

no no too depressing this needs to be a celebration of sorts lets go completely the other way how about super deformed mini versions of the creatures the characters costumes are based on?

Because theres nothing that screams insane anime excess quite like merchandising.

Or something, look I didn’t say the hook had to make sense it may not even be what the final designs story is about but having those five extra characters to work with opened up a wealth of design possibility’s and pushed the tone of the piece more towards a sense of fun.

From there all the research and sketching comes back into play and I realise I would quite like to make almost a logo out of the design, you know like one of those games with all the guys holding pointy weapons out of the design and various angles. Thats the second hook then and the block is well and truly obliterated. In the final part we will quickly cover the actual design process.

Part 5: Add Obligatory Spiral.

We are covering a lot of ground now its been a bumpy ride but the goal is in sight. Mostly because we have finished the sketch and its been approved so now we go into redraw and refine mode.

Flip the image, fix errors improve lines and the use of space, no pesky thinking about concepts to worry about here.

Transfer back to digital cut up, rearrange, flip push liquify and scale. Nope just good old fashioned learnt techniques.

Draw one final time and then again on the mat itself and then its on to the colouring.

I'll going to be keeping the background simple for this one, theres quite a lot going on already so best not to distract from the foreground to much. If you squint theres a hint that the overall composition forms the shape of the factions mirror logo thing but its subtle and I gradually made it less of a thing as I made revisions.

We are also going to add a white outline to all the figures because thats something else thats a pretty traditional Yugioh styling choice. That said the characters themselves are going to lean towards the more realistic side of lighting, thats more a byproduct of where I currently am at with my art.

And we are done the victory is ours we have overcome the void won the day.

Until next time keep moving forward, sideways, or backwards if you have to, inspiration will hit you eventually.

Just not across roads, thats not inspiration, those are cars.