Hello community! How are your battles going today?

I'm back for the @Splinterlands weekly contest, this time I decided to illustrate a very striking and powerful character, the beautiful Selenia Sky, this card has something I love, a dragon and that's why I wanted to make her fan art for the contest, I hope you like it and tell me how many battles have you won using her?

By the way, I have a news for you Splinterlands lover, I have decided to tokenize my first art made for the contest, the Gloridax Soldier, so if this is one of your favorite cards or you want to support my art, feel free to go to @NFTshowroom and take one (or all the editions) for your collection.

https://nftshowroom.com/hadley4/gallery/hadley4_splinterlands-fanart_on-the-victory

Tools:

Gaomon S620
Photoshop
Brushes courtesy of Imad Awan: Download here

_Reference

-Step 1:

As usual I started with the base of the illustration, the sketch, depicting a Selenia a little more mature than the original Splinterlands card (which looks a little more youthful) and tried to make the dragon as faithful to the original as possible.

-Step 2:

In a new layer I started to work the volume through the grayscale, so the characters were coming to life, besides having the first decisions of illumination.

-Step 3:

The first attempt to take the gray to color was awful! I remember that I colored the dragon with an emerald green in a layer set to multiply, but then for the background I applied some filters to improve the lighting and increase the saturation and it really looked disgusting, so I deleted all those layers and started again, working with the color blend and overlay modes to give more light to the scene that was supposed to be in the daytime.

-Step 4:

I'm not used to make scenes so illuminated or with that daytime ambience, so I always take as a reference the illustrations made for Legends of Runeterra, which really brings together excellent professional artists that I admire, so whenever I go to color, I stop to analyze a piece of these and find out what technique or mode of fusion they use to achieve such striking scenes and rich in color. In this case to show more saturation and warmer colors, I illuminated with the "overlay" and "soft light" fusion mode both the dragon and the sky.

-Step 5:

Something I forgot to mention before, is that I resized Selenia's size, to enhance the dragon's power, I was also a little short of time and that's why I eliminated the spear (forgive me for such a sin). But on the other hand I loved Selenia's blonde hair, which really wasn't that difficult to achieve, at first I forgot about the yellow and applied a more metallic tone I would say, which was lost when I increased the illumination, so it wasn't worth it.

Something I left until the end were the dragon's teeth, because I wanted to give him a friendlier look, I wanted his face to look like when you give love to your pet and he enjoys it and wants you not to stop, but it was difficult to get it, but come on! those red eyes and sharp teeth didn't collaborate for something friendly.

I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.