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.

Avengers Custom Playmat

Finally I can talk about a mat I created over two months ago, now I just need to remember what I wanted to say about it...

Lets start with the basics; Birthday present so basically top secret, luckily I had a pretty good idea of which characters they preferred which explains this particular lineup. I also knew that doing it in a similar style to the Batman mat was something they would prefer, and now we can have Marvel Vs DC when they play against each other.

On my side I knew I wanted to try something other than a black background and that I wanted to push the design further in other ways too although I wasn't sure what they were yet. With all these things considered and after much research we skip past the initial sketch and go straight into looking at the production  

1. Much like the Batman Mat I have used tape to mask off areas in order to lay the large red area down quickly, also like the batman mat I have to build a stencil to mask off the logo, except this time I have to be much more precise, which is tricky with masking tape especially the tight angles.

I have also started blocking in the general shapes with a pale pink, mostly on the red areas while in figure 2 i do the same with the rest. The advantage here is that if you make a mistake it doesn't matter because the colours will be lost under the finished image anyway.

3. I start shading the red areas since red seems to be the most dominant colour in the image. Ideally you should probably lay down basic block colour for all the elements of the image before starting on the shading but I don't know what the background is going to look like yet and also don't feel like working on certain characters just yet.

In 4 and 5 I move on to the blues since there is also quite a few of them in the image, I skip Wolverine for much the same reason as the previous paragraph, typically if there is an element of the image I'm leaving until later its because I want to give myself more time to think about how to do it, and Wolverine's costume and pose was one of the most time consuming parts of preproduction. I went through half a dozen different poses (remembering that they also had to work in the context of the small space he had to fit in) and several different styles before settling on this final one. 

As we are woking on blue anyway at this point I figure I will also darken the reds while I am at it and add some purple to act as shadows, although I'm still not 100% on where the light source actually is yet.

6. I finally start on darkening and shading Wolverine, I've gone with his costume from the 80's cartoon partly because its one of the more iconic ones but mainly because thats the version I grew up watching so its easiest to remember. Also because it felt he would look a little out of place if everyone else in the image is wearing their costumes and he was just wearing a leather jacket.

Aside from the fact Iron man was always in the middle the final layout came quite late. Thor was initially on the other side and Spiderman wasn't always upside down. Having decided on the final layout of the characters I still had no idea what the background would look like however after working on the mat for a while I did know that i wanted the cells to be more integrated than the other mats. Part of that comes though in the way Hulk is trying to break out of his and Captain America is clearly in front of Scarlet Witch but I also wanted the background to cross the whole image as well. 

7. In the end I decided to just wing it, Spiderman was clearly hanging from something he needs a building behind him, Scarlet Witch may as well share it since she is flying, lets just use the cell wall as a marker and draw parallel lines from that. We also have an image where the center character is at the bottom of a v shape so the other lines can run in that direction and then boom you have yourself your first building.

8. the rest of the background fell into place quite easily after that, many of the buildings are inspired by the skyline from the Avengers movie and I even managed to get Stark Tower and the Baxter building in there. The hardest part was maintaining the perspective, both sides had to work their way down to a vanishing point somewhere behind Iron Man's head. And yes it is another orange sky, but there was no way I was doing a blue one when i had the opportunity to do skyscrapers with orange reflections.

9. Now the background was done and I have a better idea of where the light and shadows are going to be I start working on the areas I have left up to this point. Another thing this mat shares with the batman mat is that many of the characters are a blend of both the movie and comic versions, Iron Man's reactor cover for example was triangular for a while but in the end I decided that I preferred the round one similarly Thor is mostly based on the movie version as is Captain America. That said I'm not all that fussed about exact costume accuracy, the most important thing for me is 'can you look at the image from across the room and tell who these people are?' After that you can get into the minutia of things if your that way inclined.

10. I've skipped ahead a bit because it was mostly finishing touches and colouring the logo but the important thing here is that after walking past the mat while letting it dry a great many times I came to the conclusion it wasn't dark enough. Taking a major risk because my stock of remover was quite low I just went in with a black and started darkening things. A risky move to be sure but it worked out, the image definitely needed to be darker since the light is coming from behind the characters. Really they should be in even more shadow than this but then you just end up with a bunch of black cut outs so you have to take some liberties with physics. 

11. I finish up the hands, start on the magic effects for the two casters and do some line work, I have also toned the black down a bit on Iron Man's armour since I had a gold colour I decided to use that instead. Between this and 12 I add the eyes, do some shading with a bunch of different colours to tie everything in, and add while highlights and Thor's hammer's lighting effects

Finally here is a scan of the mat, It's come up a bit darker than the real thing but between this and the image at the beginning you can get a good idea of how the real thing looks  as well as getting an idea of all the little details like the lightning on the hammer, the magic sparkles, or the fish scale effect on Captain Americas outfit (he's got stubble as well but its more subtle)..

And thats how I assembled the Avengers, well mostly, theres probably another article just about the sketches but we have run long enough for now. I still have a number of other mats to catch up with before we start looking at newer ones again so look out for one of those next week, probably one including other beings that like thunder and lightning.