Hello Alien Art and Splinterlands community! This week I’m back in the contest after some time away due to a busy schedule.
I wanted to bring a cover-style piece, focusing more on the character's upper body. I found this dark elf design beautiful, so I created the necessary elements to add details some of them adjusted to fit my personal style. The final result, with its strong color contrasts, turned out just the way I like it. Let’s keep going!
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These were the images I selected after the selection process. I started by retouching the woman, focusing on her ears, which were covered by hair. I added volume to the hair so it extended beyond the cutout and didn’t look too flat. Then I used the liquify tool to stretch the ear pixels and give it that classic pointed elf look.
I took the base pink color and created a solid layer with a mask. I painted over the character to remove the pink from her hair, keeping the opacity low to preserve a look similar to the original. Then I noticed she had a subtle eyeshadow, so I used a stronger pink to paint that area, and with the overlay effect, it matched the original look quite well.
I used AI to generate a prompt: "Creation of crystals with a 3D look or style." The result was just what I needed, and the solid white background made it easier to cut out the objects. I placed them on her face and then warped them to match the perspective. It was the element that came closest to what I wanted to create visually on her face.
In the first capture, where the used elements appear, there's a woman covered with a large piece of fabric. I used that fabric to create her dress, placing and warping it to fit the correct perspective. Then, over the black clothing, I painted the edges of the dress with a solid pink/violet color to give the stitching a more realistic look, and I blurred some areas where the light hits.
Once all the elements were merged, I darkened the image using exposure, levels, and curves layers to highlight the lights on her face. Then, gradually, using three shades of pink/violet, I created the fire or magic emerging from her hands. I used smoke brushes and a glow effect to enhance it on her hair, hand, and part of her face. In the images below, you can see the comparison between the version without those depth effects and the one with them — it’s a change I like to apply in most of my designs.
If you look closely, I added a kind of tattoo on her face with the word Splinterlands to give it a more aesthetic and modern touch, bringing the design into a more current style. The color of the tattoo, combined with her hair tone, really helps unify the design. Since it’s not an overly complex piece structurally, it allows room to play with these kinds of details and give the edit a fresh direction.
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For the background, I chose a color that contrasted well with the elf's tone, then added a layer behind to enhance the upper light using that same shade. I included bats with motion effects to create a sense of diffusion and depth in the design. The composition is supported by a clean font and the character's story text below. I also placed the tribal image in the background, as it brought great dynamism to the final piece, and I added violet tones in the gray areas to further play with the light reflections. I hope you like it, and see you in another entry!
