Talia Firestorm fanart for Splinterlands Art Contest!

Splinterlands Art Contest

Hello guys!

I decided to participate for this week's contest with Talia Firestorm as my entry.

I know it's been a while since I participated in this contest. I have been preoccupied with other things plus I think I'm also losing my skills drawing humans and similar shaped creatures since I'm focused more on drawing creatures lately. I thought participating in the splinterlands art contest would help me remember my skills slowly haha. I'll try to explain the process in a much more detailed way this time.

Talia Firestorm

As you can see I made the character more human in my version because of what u said above plus I really wanted to see how this character will look like in the human form. If you look at the official art the character is cute so I tried to retain that in here through her face design and expression. Luckily I saved a reference which was well suited for this from Pinterest a while back so that's what I used here to create this fanart.

The Process

I started working on the rough sketch as usual. Made appropriate changes to her anatomy to make her character resemble a bit human as if she has this ability to switch between monster and human side.

After the rough sketch was made the lineart was painted using pen fade brush at 1.8 thickness and 48% opacity to create a soft clean lineart. After that was done I painted the base layer of colours of the character.

I always start with eyes. It's one of the things that gives life to the painting so like I said I started painting her beautiful blue eyes in my style by adding highlights and shadows on appropriate places. After that was done it was refined a bit using pen fade brush again to increase sharpness in certain areas.

After the eye rendering was done I moved on to the skin and horn area of the character. The light source is from above but is at a 45° angle so the shadows are painted according to that. It's one of things that you need the reference for otherwise the result won't be as good. I also airbrushed a gradient green and yellow colour on the base layer to create more volume.

After the shades were painted I blended it using blue tool and airbrush. The intensity of the blur depends on the lighting condition and shapes along with other things.

Now it was time to add the most important thing that'll make the skin pop. I'm talking about highlights hehe. Based on the shape and lighting it was added onnthe character and later slightly blended to the skin.

At this stage I started rendering her horns. I already applied the darker shades as per the lighting earlier so it was time to add highlights and bounce light on it. After that was done I started painting the hair.