Hello, hello once again how are you? this week I was looking for new cards to paint for the Splnterlands weekly contest, and Gladius cards always end up stealing my attention, in fact I want to paint Fina Voxom one of these days, but I'm not here to talk about fire, today I've come up with a Dragon
Descendant of the race of the Chamen, warriors who mostly perished facing the Titan of Doom (I've been looking all over splintercards and I didn't find this character, if anyone knows which one it is, please send me the image of the card, and if it doesn't exist, then maybe I'll finally do a little bit of painting, Larissa Kerato is one of the most powerful living weapons of all Gloridax since she masters to perfection the magic of Dragon, I even believe that she could face the Titan of Doom that devastated her people centuries ago.
In the sketch I tried to make Larissa's hands stand out, since that is where her immense power comes from, for this I used as a reference photographs of dancers but with a more theatrical aura. Once the sketch was ready, I filled the shape of the character, adding immediately the colors of her clothes, skin and hair, all this only with flat colors.
Immediately I started working on Larissa's face, using lights and shadows in pink tones to give volume to her features, highlighting some very intense pink highlights to emphasize the reflections of her Dragon's magic. I also gave the first details to her hair and hands to get a better general idea of the character.
Through intense lights, I wanted to achieve to give a latex texture to his suit, accompanying it with the metal ornaments that cover his whole body, this metal I did in a new layer, where I could paint his shape without fear of going out of it using the transparent pixel lock function, so I could create a surface with many lights and shadows alike where I did not limit myself only to the gray color, but I added some blue, gold and violet to better simulate the reflections of the environment.
To accentuate the Dragon magic , I gave very striking colors to the background, the most remarkable is the green one that is right behind Larissa, making her silhouette come out of the screen and the view focuses only on her and the movement of her hands. And in case you are wondering, that magenta surface at the bottom of the scene, was supposed to be a bit of water, since I wanted to add a small lake or something like that, but I totally failed, although it doesn't look bad at all, so I kept it in the final result 😅.
And here comes the biggest change in the painting, something I always do to correct mistakes, is to turn the canvas horizontally, applying a mirror mode, I do this to have the character as proportionate as possible, especially in her face, but while doing this, a friend who was next to me when I was painting told me that he liked much more how the character looked in this position, so he made me change my mind, and also made me think that Larissa really looked more dynamic in this new pose. But I wanted to show you this last change, so I decided not to rotate the images I had saved for the step by step, because it's always great to have a second opinion to make changes to your painting, even if they are last minute.
I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.
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