Bayonetta Playmat

There is some debate as to whether or not spines are useful structures. Personally I find mine handy for keeping my upper body from being somewhere around my waist. Bayonetta's designers clearly feel differently however, often contorting her into a wide array of painfully impossible poses.

Her chiropractor must make a fortune.

Back Pain aside I have a few more mats from 2012 to get through before I start on 2013 and this is one of them.

Two things happened before I started production of this mat the first was I figured out how to do white on a much larger scale, not just leave white space but actually add white, and secondly I bought a different brand of black for the line work. these two elements combined to inform the overall look of the final piece with its much lighter than my usual colour schemes and a generally more realistic looking face and hair, although that may have as much to so with scale as anything else. A few mats on and I think maybe I would have gone a bit darker with it and if you have been reading my posts you will notice I havent been able to resist having an element of an orange sky in there somewhere, but overall for what it is and what I learnt from crating it I am quite happy with the end results.

As far as the curvature of her spine goes, after some research into gymnastics, I settled on something not quite as extreme as most artwork depicts her. I could have pushed the curve a bit more, real people can bend slightly more than I have depicted, but the sketches where I did proved that it didn't take much to push it over the edge from believable to somewhat silly looking.

Much like the characters famed flexibility its also my first mat to have been designed to work either way around which explains the rather nondescript horizon and general jaunty angle everything is draw at. There are a number of extra details that you have to consider when you decide to do this sort of thing though, the main one being that you really need to get the shadows right, which probably explains the minimal shadowing on the background elements. Its also why I prefer to view the image this way up since it was the direction I worked on the mat the most and therefore makes the most sense to me. People who haven't worked on it however may have other opinions and thats one of the nice things about this style, the added decision making.

I was quite a way into production before i noticed I had neglected to add her glasses though, thankfully I remembered as it also solved an issue I was having with her hair making her look to masculine when viewed one way around, its funny how things work out sometimes, one little detail can change everything.