Sketch Gallery
Playmats I have known
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Magic players usually play on playmats which are basically old-school mouse pads that got dosed with radiation and grew oversized (~14x24”). Some enterprising vendors at some point also started producing blank ones, and players often bring them by to get signed or, “Doodled,” on.
I have a love/hate relationship with these things.
It took a long time to kind of arrive at a drawing method that kind of works on these. They are synthetic fabric on top, fairly smooth but with some noticeable weave. They chew up the markers we typically bring for signatures, in short order. If you draw with pencil on them, you really can’t erase so it basically leaves you working with no prep.
I’ve occasionally taken commissions for these to do at home, particularly at the full-mat size which I couldn’t possibly do at an event. The Balance mat here is an example of that.
But working with markers exclusively was not great since it’s hard to get a fine line with them unless I carry different sizes. It’s good for massing darks, but again the felt tip nibs on them get chewed up by the surface texture and the ink flow goes light.
So eventually I decided to try drawing on them using my favorite ball point pen, the Uniball Vision, fine point. These are archival inks and I love using them for writing. Turns out they draw well on these mats and allow me to do more of a pencil-shading. They are also resilient to the surface of the mats. This made these drawings way more palatable. I’ll do a super light rough pencil line under it, then the bulk of the work with the pen. Sometimes I’ll combine them with marker for shading.
Then there are the outlier mats. A niche product, there are some mats that are super soft, like so soft you expect to turn around and see a cat curled up on it at any moment. Great for protecting your cards I guess but a nightmare to draw on.
These challenges mean I have mostly shied away from doing these more recently. As well, it’s very difficult to price them out. If I price by size, which would be ideal, some full-mat drawings would be super detailed, others less so. This gets trickier when players want to get multiple drawings on a mat from different artists, and have a general fraction of the mat they’d like me to draw on. Negotiating these prices is really not my idea of a good time.
If I reintroduced doing these regularly, I might just break it down into geographic subdivisions with set prices for each. But that bit where the players kind of need them done quick to get other artists to work on them, when events can mean you don’t get much chance to work on drawings, becomes an unfortunate stressor.
I said above that I have a love/hate relationship with these, and I’ve mostly talked in negative tones. So what do I love? Well, I love that players want these done, I love their excitement in getting a drawing they are happy with, and I love that they enjoy these practical and usable forms of art that they’ll often get real use out of, even if the many hours of play eventually wears the drawings down.
So while I’m very unlikely to do these currently, I can’t say they are out of the question forever. I just need to think of how to approach them in a clear and upfront way.