Here is my entry for the weekly Splinterlands Art contest found HERE
From the Splinterlands Wiki:
The village folk always say that Tarsa was born with fire in her blood, and that is true in many ways. Her burning rage and quick temper are amplified by her powers to summon and control fire. While her parents and teachers tried to instill patience for such dangerous magic, Tarsa had little time for that. She used her abilities to bully and threaten those that got in her way.
Her young and innocent-looking appearance only helped her to further manipulate people around her. “Tarsa always gets what Tarsa wants” is what she says to herself every time something or someone challenges her.
When the Chaos Legion arrived, Tarsa saw this as an opportunity to have free reign of her fire power without interference from anyone else. So long as the Chaos Legion opens the path for her, she can burn everything else to the ground.
Here is her original card art:
So we've got the medeival dress, the red hair, and the slow-motion walk leaving fire and ashes in her wake like Drew Barrymore at the end of Firestarter.
So, I went with a different art style on this one. This is what I call my "ribbon and spray paint" technique. It's good for fast paint jobs and is the same style I use for my web comic The Real Superheroines of Hive Valley (which everyone should check for updates on my Hive blog five days a week).
Step 1: Rough sketch. I use a wide chunk of pastel to lay out the rough figure, then refine it a little bit using a mechanical pencil. (Now by "pastel" and "mechanical pencil" I mean the digital brushes in Clip Studio Paint.
Step 2: The reason I call it "Ribbon" is because of the line art layer. I use a pen brush called the "For Effect Line" that essentially draws in Nike-swoosh-shaped lines. They look like this:
Which takes some getting used to because 1) there is no pressure-sensitivity in this brush, so it is always at it's maximum width in the middle of the stroke and tapers to points at either end, and 2) there is no line-stabilization feature option either, which means you have to have steady hands when making long curves.
I originally started drawing with this brush to emulate the style of a poster artist from the 80's named Ty Wilson. Here's one of his pieces:
Ty Wilson, "The Date" 1988
So, drawing with ribbons and then hiding the rough sketch layer, I come up with this:
Which is not quite as minimalist as Ty Wilson's work, but very simple compared to contemporary comic artists.
Step 3: Slop on some colors. I just use an India ink brush and throw some color onto a separate layer. If I feel like being more careful in this step, I sometimes use a watercolor brush, but I use my step 4 speed hack instead.
"that looks terrible, Matt!"
Step 4: Some might call this cheating. But not even remotely as cheating as those of you typing a prompt into an AI art generator. I set the line art layer as the Reference layer. Then in the Clip Studio Tools I use Edit > Colorize > Use Hint Image and Colorize and it converts that previous layer into this:
Which is colorful, but not much better. Honestly, it usually does a better job. It takes the paint colors that I originally laid down and using the line art as a reference, spreads paint across the entire canvas. I think most artists usualyl have their colors on different layers, so they probably wouldn't use this technique.
Step 5: Clean-up that auto-color mess. I use the Smooth Watercolor Brush, because it is really good at pushing paints around the canvas. In fact, let's just call that auto-color a FAIL I could have just started with the watercolor brush and probablyo gotten it to this point in about the same time frame.
The auto-color feature usually looks about like this, a fairly subdued, pastel tone. I'd like to make it brighter, so first thing I do is duplicate the color layer. Since it's a "multiply" layer it just kind of doubles the intensity of the colors.
Lastly, is the airbrush portion. Remember, this technique is called Ribbons and Airbrush. On one of the overlapping color layers I just start adding in shadows and highlights. Oddly enough I use a "Shadow" Airbrush and a "Highlight" Airbrush tool. For the shadows I only use a very light gray and beige color to add in shadows. If I want darker shadows I just swipe it 2 or 3 times rather than picking different colors. For the highlights, I just set the color to whatever the primary light source is (in this case a bright yellow) and airbrush in some highlights. While the Shadow brush acts like a "multiply" layer when you spray it, the Highlight brush will actually adjust the color based on the color you are going over. So if you airbrush yellow highlights onto red hair it makes a light orange color.
Here's what it looks like after inhaling a lot of spray paint fumes (digital spray paint fumes of course)
Final Step: I don't usually do this, but the last thing I did for this is to soften the line art layer. I don't do this typically for my comics because the black line art makes it look more comic-y. So, what I did is I duplicated the line art layer, set both layers to 25% opacity, then use a gaussian blur (12 strength) on one of the layers. That changes the image to this:
Is that better or worse? Pretend you are at the optometrist office and scroll back and forth between the last two images. Which is better, number 1 or number 2? The opaque black lines look more like a comic. If I was better at rendering, I should be able to do away with the lineart layer completely and it would look like a proper fine art watercolor or acrylic painting. I'm just not there, really. I think the indistinct lines work here because if she's walking out of fire there should be a heat haze effect at play.
So, that was it for the process. For a timelapse video complete with an original musical score composed by Matt S. Law using a free online tool called Soundation Studio, click on this link (the link, not the iamge, the image does not go anywhere)
