Splinterlands Art Contest!
Hello guys, I'm back again with another blog today hehe. I had to post this today itself because I keep messing up the deadline XD. It looks like I can finally post on regular intervals after this post. I was planning this to happen for a while now and I'm glad that it finally happened. By posting Splinterlands social media challenge on Wednesday and posting contest blog on Saturday will give me enough time to work on both of them properly. So for this week I decided to draw the Samurai of Splinterlands game, Tenyii Striker. I never seen anyone draw him for this contest so I took the opportunity to draw him in my style for this week's contest. I made some minor changes on his design. I hope you guys like it hehe.
Tenyii Striker
The Process...
When I see a card which utilizes the complimentary colours or primary colours as the colour palette I jump right in and draw it haha. This character had that so I had to draw him but with some tweaks on the design of my own. Finding pose reference for this guy was the easiest thing to do because if you have been watching demon slayer anime there are tons of cool sword action scenes in it. All I had to do was to pick one that I liked the most. I choose Zenitsu's pose here because it felt right at the moment. After drawing the rough sketch I made a clean lineart on Ibis app. After that I layed down the base colours for this character and decided the direction of the source of light. I decided to add the light source from the sword itself. Next thing I did was I shaded his clothes one by one according to the direction of the source of light. If you look at the official design the armour is hidden a bit and the colour they used there is different from what I used here. I took this opportunity to change it up a bit. After making certain changes on his armour I also shaded it in respect to the source of light.
The next part was to paint the flame. I managed to paint one but later decided to go with the style which you see in the final version because later on I had plans to add a radial blur on it to show the depth hehe. The fire was painted in an Add layer. The glow and fire particles around it was painted on the same add layer. After that I duplicated the layer and applied Gaussian blur to achieve the glow effect. I also used airbrush to increase the intensity of the light. When I did this I also increased the darkness of the shade colours of his clothes to match the enchanced lighting. After I was done with the shadow colours I started painting the highlights on his body. This is best part if you ask me hehe. The highlight colour we use here truly shows the intensity of the flame. I really like yellow highlights. I decided to add highlights on the sword as well with the same colour. I used a new brush here to do that. I think it looks much better with those highlights and this is why I always pick cards with red colour in them. I did the same thing with my last art blog as well hehe. I guess you can call that as a test run.
Finally, it was time to paint the background. If you notice the wip shots I was going to post with a simple background but today I changed my mind and decided to try out some other brushes on Ibis. I made a simple forest background with the new brushes I found on Ibis. I didn't want to add more details in there because after finishing the thing I planned to add a radial blur. Although I did add some details on the grass which was near the source of light. I also made a shadow on his right side as well and after that I was done with the artwork hehe.
✨Result✨
Tools used: Ibis paint x, Notebook and Pencil
Duration: 9hrs
Pose reference
Thank you so much for your time and I will be back with a new blog next Wednesday 😊