Good Day Splinterlands and Aliens of Hive! Creating fanart and art entry for Splinterlands has always been both challenging and exciting for me because on how i will try to give the cards or characters a different vibe using my own art style. For this week's art contest which is the 360th now i mean amazing that it runs for this long and still there's been a lot of entries here and there. I chose to illustrate “Coastal Sentry” and as my art entry this time.
This fanart was created in Clip Studio Paint,a pc software intended for digital illustration. My goal was to recreate Coastal Sentry in my own art style and to sketch her in a settings that gives that Mermaid look and put a background there that compliment her character. Anyway let me start with the art process.
ART PROCESS
The very first step was to do a rough sketch of Coastal Sentry. There's a starting brush tool which is the gpen in Using Clip Studio Paint and i often use that for my rough sketch. I wanted Coastal Sentry to appear a little bit of mystic and magical i don't know if i explain in right, so i drew her seated on a rocky shore with her trident held by her left hand. I intentionally tilted her face towards the sky since i think creates a sense of being powerful, as if shes listening to the call of the sea. At this stage or phase of which is just i said was rough the proportions and anatomy were not perfect yet since that wasn’t my goal at the moment. The idea was to draw a pose for now.
Next would be once i am satisfied with the sketch, i began to refine the line art. There is this function in CS Paint that you could increase the stabilization of the brushes, this is very helpful to draw clean lineart but the downside is that you can not draw faster, well as you should to create a cleaner lineart.
With the line art complete i moved to flat coloring. I blocked in areas of base color using gray tone.
Next step is that i color the all the skin first in which i chose the light green color, it is either light blue or light green as far as i know, anything that gels well with the purple and blue clothings of her.
Then i finish coloring all the base colors of Coastal Sentry, i didn't expect this step would took a lot of time since it was just filling the shapes using bucket tool but the idea was for it to feel aesthetic as what most of my artworks centered to. So planning and choosing the color wisely is time consuming after all, since i didn't just color pick from the reference.
This step now involves polishing the illustration of Coastal Sentry by shading and highlighting the necessary parts, it was very challenging since i drew the whole body of the character and there are parts that i needed to zoom in for me to do the shadows and highlights. I also added light reflections on the hair and particular parts of the body, i somewhat made her body slightly glossy since she is from under the sea.
The last stage of my art process is about the background, i tried to render it with all my might haha no just kidding, i am not that good at doing the background yet since it was very tiring to do the subject itself so i am usually doing the background from the leftover of my powers.
