The flames of Riftwatchers burn brightly in this illustration for week 227 of the @Splinterlands art contest. Sometimes I feel adventurous and mix two Splinterlands characters in an illustration, but this time I wanted to go a little further and take a risk with three characters, the biggest challenge was to make synergy between them and that they all had a good role in the scene.
In the Riftwatchers folio there are five fire cards, but putting all these characters in the same illustration seemed crazy, so I decided to be modest and only chose the flamethrower Tinderlock, the demon monarch Mordeus and Septic Slime.
Mordeus feeds and manifests through anger, taking control in any place where this anger is intense, so I have made him emerge from the flames thrown by the Tinderlock who is in a pyromaniac frenzy while the Septic Slime feeds on all those fallen in the flames, it is a scene where I assure you that no one would survive this attack.
The main idea was for Tinderlock to hold his flamethrower between both hands, in fact, I had already looked for reference to metal guitarists as they usually do cool poses while they are playing, plus Rammstein usually do very crazy concerts with Paul Landers and Richard Kruspe doing a fire show.
It was great that tinderlock was holding the flamethrower with both hands, but I wanted a little more looseness in his pose, plus in the card he holds the flamethrower with only one hand, so I decided to put his weapon on his shoulder and let Mordeus emerge from it, while of course I added some color to the scene. By the way, here you can still see some lines on the right side of the canvas, and I was planning to make a fourth character in this same scene, but three were already crazy, I still don't want to saturate the illustration with too many characters.
Then I started to detail the flamethrower and Tinderlock's clothes, adding a lot of contrast to make the flames stand out and attack the viewer, so I tried to give a lot of aggressiveness to Mordeus' flaming head, I wanted to show that it is a manifestation of anger.
Something that I had not told you is that this is not a new illustration, I have months of having started it, the sketch dates from November 11, 2022, and I was not liking how it was getting, because the colors were not correct and the scene looked very flat, the slime looked as if it were an explosion, so I decided to stop it indefinitely, that until this week I opened again the . psd, mixed all the layers and then with the lasso tool I was selecting and separating in new ones each character to detail them individually.
Once I had the characters separated, I spent hours correcting the flamethrower, since I don’t usually draw weapons with this shape I always have problems with their perspective, but I don’t give up, I paint over and over until the weapon is provided, although I had to resort to the design of the weapon in the letter and take from there the butt and that bow that is between the cannon and the fire cylinder. I also added more darkness to the scene to make the fire shine even more, although this generated a conflict, since the texture of the slime is bright, but it should be in the background, so I could not stand out too much, so I had to use light colors, but they didn’t become white.
As a conclusion I have to say that it was interesting to do this scene, but being something started a few months ago, I realize that the composition is not adequate, as it is very static and subtracts that fierce touch to the characters, so from now on I propose that the next scene I do with two or more characters of Splinterlands I will make them with more dynamic and interesting compositions
I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.
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