You may be tired of reading me say this, but I really think this is one of my best pieces for @Splinterlands so far, I have achieved the rendering I have always wanted to get to, I have invested many hours but the magic now is truly magical.
The proudest of the daughters of the moon is here today, the Lunakari who is not afraid to show her ancestry in the battle arena, flaunting her power at all times, but I doubt that anyone would wish to face her when the moon rises in the sky. If she fights, you should bet on her victory, you will never lose and your pockets will be glad.
You know how much I love to force the perspectives and this time was not going to be an exception, I tried to place the character in the middle of the canvas, starring completely the whole scene, also I resorted to Clip Studio Paint to take a 3D model of a spear and place it at the right angle following the position of the arm, but as I made some cuts to the 3D model to improve its shape, I had to draw a guide line that let me know which is the middle of the spear, to transform it correctly in Sola's staff.
Because I would place Sola in a night environment, I have chosen a cool color palette for the character, and I have drawn the shape of each element of the character using Photshop's pen tool to separate them in different layers. Then with the airbrush I gave the first touches of shading on the clothes, and I lightened a little the skin, since the base color was a bit dark.
To detail the clothes I used a brush I have called "Airbrush Noisy" which leaves a very nice texture that matches the shimmer and shadows of the clothes correctly, I also adjusted the gold tone of the metallic embellishments to match the night setting. For the skin I used the hard light fusion mode and with this I gave some subtle touches of violet color between the illuminated areas and the shadows on the skin.
In the original image of the Splinterlands card, Sola is on her back, so I was completely unaware of the design of her clothes on the front, so I wanted to give her some details, not so complex, but enough to make them eye-catching and more interesting than just the plain fabric. And I also took the opportunity to adjust the color of the tip of Sola's staff.
Finally it's time to work on the background, for this I first made a big moon just behind Sola Rangell's head, with this I managed to achieve contrast and therefore more focus on Sola's face. I also gave more detail to the tip of the staff.
Something important to talk about is the railing behind the main character, I didn't make it myself, I looked for a free 3D model, I found it in free3d, but I didn't even download the model, I just took the preview image, cut it out and adapted it to the perspective I needed and then I coloured it adapting it to the artwork environment.
Then I was patiently rendering, highlighting the lighting of the scene, normally I would have detailed the small details as much as possible, but I knew that many of them would be lost when uploading the image to hive, so I preferred to avoid spending hours on it, so I spent some time playing with the blending modes to give glows worthy of the Lunakari's magic, highlighting the use of "overlay", "soft light" and "hard light", I also applied a kind of glitch effect, which is achieved by duplicating the illustration, turning off some channels of the RGB spectrum and then regulating the effect with a layer mask, so it will only show up in the areas I want.
I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.
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