Hey there, all. I hope you've had a lovely week so far. It's been a bit over a week, and I'm finally back to drawing my next fan art for the Splinterlands Art Contest. The entry from two weeks ago wasn't registered since I submitted it pretty late, so I used the same one for the context the week after, and that is the reason behind the absence of last week's Splinterlands Art Contest entry.
Anyway, we're back with full strength, and for this week's contest, I drew one of the game's Monsters, but with a twist - I didn't make them human! That's right. As you already know, I always stick with humanizing monsters from games and such, but this time I tried to keep the race as the original art. (The original character is already a humanoid, so tackling that wasn't as big a challenge since I only needed to adjust the changes to Talia's face and make her resemble a humanoid reptile).
And that's the story of my entry for this week. With the general idea of it out of the way, let's get down to the nitty gritty of the drawing and tackle the details in this piece.
The Process
I always try to keep the line art minimal in my pieces, and this one was no exception. I tried to keep it even more minimal than usual since this time I was working with a non-human subject, and not being as well-versed in drawing them as normal human characters, I was trying to keep and make some room for improvisation if needed be.
Then I kicked things off by flat coloring the subject...
... and when that was done, I jumped right into coloring the background. The background wasn't to my liking - sure it did help introduce some contrast in this phase, but I knew I was going to change that later one. (as I always do)
With the flat coloring out of the way, it was time to breathe life and dimension into the piece by adding the shadows and some minor highlights in this step.
As I was satisfied with the shadows, I focused on this next step to add more highlights and bring out more of Talia's details and intricacies by adding glows and highlights. Maybe the dark background played a role in giving an illusion that the first minimal shadows in the drawing were enough, but I was confident and quite satisfied with how it looked until now that I decided not to mess with it any further. Sure, I did make some adjustments here and there, but nothing game changing or ground breaking whatsoever.
And this is the one step that I fix the character's eyes by adding the highlights and making them look less evil and dead (you might have noticed how they remove the light in the character's eyes in anime when they die or get taken over by something evil)
The Result
And in the next and final step of the drawing, I filled in the background with a gradient light coming from the top right and added the usual magical flares and sparkles here and there. And since there's more light in the canvas, I adjusted the highlights and the glows on her hair and other parts to fit the new lighting setup.
Original Game Art
And last but not least, the original art of the in-game card for those of you curious:
This is it for this week's contest. Do let me know what you think about this piece in the comments down below. Good luck to everyone participating in this week's contest, and I'll see you all in next week's competition... cheers~~