Today I'm going to talk about the latest mat I have completed, and following on from the Starscream mat talk a little more about design.
I went through quite a lengthy sketching process before i finally got to the design I was after, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do in my head but getting the view from above right was quite tricky I wasnt even sure the arms were in the right place until I had finished it.
For a long time I also resisted the urge to fine line it, the reds and greens were doing a very good job of marking the edges and there was very minimal use of black on the whole mat (this image for example was scanned before I added the line-work). After leaving it for a week though I finally decided to go ahead and add in the black detail and I am glad I did as it really makes the characters pop (the yellow background helps) and look a bit more traditional anime as well.
About here in fact (Ignore the creases they are from folding it for easy transport). So lets start on the mat propper then.
No wait there is something important we are forgetting, cant quite remember what it was...
...oh right, yeah thats going to be a problem.
See as most people tend towards left or right handedness they tend to draw with a slight bias one way or the other as well and the brain tends to ignore it since its usually pretty good at filling in gaps and making stuff up, especially faces. Its only when you flip an image over that your brain goes wait no somethings not quite right here that you realise the image you have spent all that time on only looks ok one way around, which is fine but since other people are likely to look at your work and they wont have the same mental picture you do you want to make sure they don't look at it and go, 'theres something not quite right here'.
In the case of this image as I am right handed the left side tends to be more accurate than the right, you can see on the flipped image that the side of Tytannial's face in the box isn't a mirror of the other side. so now we know that we can either modify it digitally to match or even just go back into the original and tidy things up. Once thats done you flip it back and hope it looks right that way around still, if not you alter it a bit more and continue that way until it looks ok both ways.
You can also see I have changed Effect veiler's pose as there were far to many different perspectives at work.
Thats about tit for now but the moral of the story is always check you drawings mirrored before moving onto the next stage, it could save you from have problems later in the process.
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