An Epic Play Mat

At the beginning of October my youngest son approached me with a task of creating an illustration for a playmat. Essentially this is like a mouse pad, only larger. It will be rolled up, then unrolled, when he is ready to do some serious card gaming.

I accepted the challenge. Before I even began, he came up with a mood board and instructions for the playmat. I love how he used a little typographic hierarchy to tell me what is most important about the illustration. 

Together we figured out I needed to produce an illustration 24 inches wide by 14 inches deep. 

With that, I dove into creating this. To expedite the speed in which this would be produced, I chose to use a combination of AI image generation, compositing techniques, using Affinity Photo, and digital illustration where needed.

The Process

My process essentially went like this:

1. Generated images of the landscape and the dragon using Stable Diffusion. Composited those as best I could
2. Illustrated the Fox on top of the rock in which he would stand

3. Took that image into Stable diffusion image generation to develop a more refined fox that would fit in with the rest of the landscape.

3. Refined the overall look and composition of the illustration, Colors, touch up of AI images.

4.Needed a higher res image of the dragon. I cut out the head only, then used the image of the head to produce a more refined and detailed dragon head. This worked out better than I could have hoped

Before image re-generation

After image re-generation

5. Refined the Fox. Despite the improvement in the overall look of the Fox hero, there was much in the way of illustration to make it look just like the one, stylistically and design, like the fox. This involved creating new pixel layers that I used to, Illustrate with my Wacom monitor tablet, the look my Son was looking for.

6. After this I went through one round of requested edits. More illustrative refining. And we finished.

Here is an animated GIF to give you an idea of the number of layers and compositing involved with this. Also a few more Screen grabs at 100% zoom.