Walking Dead Playmat

Hands, so very many hands...

So yeah, needless to say since this mat I have had a much better grasp on drawing hands, at various angles and holding weapons, which has come in quite helpful since. 

Most noticeably on the Hellsing mat that came directly after this one, where the gloves and guns are one of the primary focuses, and I don't doubt that the mats that came after this would have looked differently without the insights learnt here.

I also seem to have spent quite a lot of time researching weapons since I began this whole endeavour, a theme that runs though my work perhaps, similar to the large number of moons that also appear, or a function of the types of people that request mats? Perhaps its to early to tell. In either case at least now I know how to draw revolvers facing forward, something of a learning experience in and of itself but also something I had always wondered about.   

Design wise here we have a mix of the comic and TV series visuals, and also the highest concentration of realistic looking faces on any of my mats (while there are others that beat it in the overall total of characters those predominately feature anime style simplified art). It turns out faces in this style and at this size are quite tricky on this material, you have to build up the colour slowly so as to avoid it running and in this instance I am also having to deal with the fact that I decide to go super heavy on the shadows for a more graphic comic book style.

Using black in this way isn't something I'm used to, comic style art wasn't something teachers were particularly keen on while I was at school and college as such I didn't want to just go into this mat blind and start blocking things in. Thankfully having a computer and graphics tablet handy allows you to test out ideas beforehand and while I was at it I also did the standard suite of changes based on looking at the image while flipped.

Having finished the mat there was something about the logo that I felt that it still needed, finally deciding that the red was to bright in comparison to the more subdued hues of the survivors clothes and the blue walkers so preceded to add some damage, as if the logo itself has been infected too.

Definitely one of the more technically chalanging designs and one of my favourites, its always nice when pieces stretch your skills and push you forward.

Homunculi FMA Playmat

After finishing up the Hellsing mat, which I will talk about another day lets try and keep the orange to a minimum for a bit shall we, I moved straight onto this one and noticeably this has resulted in a change of approach to how I deal with black. 

Before the Hellsing mat I was always having issues keeping black just that, even the really dark versions tended to dry in such a way as to make them look grey in certain angles. This turned out to be due to a combination effect between the pigment and the material of the mats. During the production of the Hellsing mat which was one I definitely needed to get the blacks right on I finally figured out a way around this problem and that insight quickly became a driving force for the style this mat ended up with.

While I had intended to keep the colours as flat as possible both because I wanted to match the style of the anime and because I just quite like the idea of trying to create a piece of art that is super flat (though on that count i suspect I wouldn't be content unless the image was 1 atom thick, most art materials and canvases are far from flat making any image therefore anything but) However the piece fought this approach at every turn most notably in the form of the rather large light source in fathers right hand and in the end I decided to just go with the flow and see where it ended up using what i had learned on the use of blacks on the previous mat and expanding it to help deal with the heavy amount of lighting this mat required. I am glad I went this route in the end its not where i originally ended to end up but if you already know where your going when you start a piece of art why even bother with the journey, it will always be more perfect in your mind, i would have never have considered lighting the background and the pillars as i did for example without the knowledge gained from the Hellsing mat.

And yes if you have counted there are 8 sins in this image having not actually watched Brotherhood yet I got a tiny bit mixed up with who was who. Still as far as I am concerned two sloths are better than one   and the weight of the image would have been thrown off by removing the version from the original anime, though I'm sure I saw her character design being reused in the remake somewhere while doing research. I almost included the few other homunculi from the first version too but in the end decided they could be represented by the creepy eyes and mouths in the background if thats how you chose to interpret those the other options being they are the true forms or created by the kid.

I think my favourite things about the final peice is just how bored father looks and that greed is likly to get himself beeten up if he isnt careful.

Kung Fu Panda vs Snowman Eater Playmat

Ok so lets try and go a week without orange in vast quantities shall we? Today its orange's best friend Teal! Digital colour grading has a lot to answer for...

I spent quite a bit of time looking at various fighting game user interfaces for ideas for the life bars and backgrounds, settling in the end for something thats a bit of a mix of everything, it also had the affect of reminding me it would be nice if they made a new Bloody Roar game though as thats not really relevant here. What is relevant is that the entire time I was working on this mat I couldn't help thinking about Clay Fighter and how Yugioh cards would look in that style, this thought ended up being a major influence on the design more thought the movement aspect rather than stylistically.

I'm sure the background much come from somewhere, the buildings are all based on research but the overall composition seems to be based on either the kung fu panda movie or the new WOW expansion or possibly from me watching far to much anime and kung fu movies over the years, it had to come in useful somewhere I suppose. The sky initially looked wrong, well it was ok but there was just this feeling of off'ness, after some time studying images of the sky it hit me that the gradient was up the wrong way, what was more of a sunset before ended up being a sunrise and looking better for it.

While I did briefly consider adding attack effects and some sort of contact effect would have been quite cool the vs in the background would have suffered for it (what I had originally planned would have taken up much of the centre of the mat) perhaps if I ever get some sort of semitransparent glow in the dark colour. Instead I ended up bringing some of the sky colours into the foreground image to provide lighting effects and because snow is very reflective it would have looked weird as just a big blob of white.

As I mentioned in the Gravekeeper mat post I have started hiding easter eggs in the designs lately and this is no exception, the the snowman eater isn't the only one of his kind in this image and there are a number of other things too.

This is actually a birthday mat but for a change one where the details were all very well know before hand which makes a nice change, the tighter the design restrictions the easier it is to come up with ideas usually, its also not something I would have ever considered by myself.

I do feel sorry for the snowman though, being dragged into this fight against its will.

Stun City Playmat

We take a look back in time today, once again to one of the earlier mats I worked on, in this case Yugioh Hero's vs Stun creatures.

You can tell its one of my earlier designs because of how much white space is left and, looking back on it now, the alarming lack of proper lighting.

Not to say there isn't shading but colour to white doesn't really seem all that interesting to me now and feels a bit basic. On the other hand I guess the upside is it does make it quite easy to upgrade this mat, it would get much darker but it might be an interesting change. It's something I haven't really mentioned before but in a number of the mats I have done I like to leave some chance for future upgrades, the Inzektor  mat is an obvious one because of the empty cells, same with the Bleach and Kung fu Panda mats though again any additions would have to be darker than the current background colour but it is possible.

Still even if the clouds are a bit jarring, I would probably do them dark now, I still like the overall composition I like that theres so much going on and it feels like an actual fight sequence, it can be quite difficult to get movement to look right sometimes. it does makes me wonder what happens next, does Captain Gold smash into Doom Caliber Knight or does the shield bat him away, Thunder King's clearly having a bad day being punched in the face like that whatever happens though.

I used to draw buildings quite a bit in ye olden days so its quite nice being able to occasionally drop a load of them in the background of one of these mats when the subject is right, I've even got one mat design laying around thats just all city but that will have to wait until I figure out how create something more along the lines of a water colour effect.

As per usual the horse proved problematic at first, my own fault for choosing odd angle for them I suppose, like hands they are something I'm getting better at, luckily unlike hands they don't get asked for as often. 

These older mats always make me wonder where they ended up.

Next week more orange? or perhaps something a bit different?