Making this Month's Playmat (Patreon)

I'm excited to share my newest playmat design! This will be available to anyone who pledges at the playmat tier before June 1st. But before I reveal the playmat, I thought it would be fun to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the steps that led to the final design.

First I drew a quick sketch of each of the main characters.

Next I drew the black outlines.

Coloring takes a few steps. The first is to just color in the main areas just like if you were filling a color book. This is called "flatting," and this is what the "flatted" version looked like.

At this point in the process, the exact colors are not finalized. It's more important for me to just get done with filling in each of the main areas. But afterwards, I'm more careful about adjusting the colors. Here's the adjusted version.

The next step is to shade everything. I do this using a combination of what's called "cell shading" (where you shade shadows with hard edges) and more gentle shading of highlights with the gradient tool on Photoshop. Sometimes you see people who are new to digital art color everything with a airbrush sort of effect. But I feel this makes everything look mushy. That's why I like to use a combination of shading effects. Once each of the characters and all the foreground objects were shaded it looked like this.

Finally, I added in all the last small effects. This included coloring the water glasses, shading the background, and adding some shimmery effects to Karn. Here's the final playmat.

Hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look! Don't forget to update your pledge if you're interested in getting your own copy. Thanks for reading!