I actually finished this like two weeks ago. I've just been too sick to post it. Today I picked up my stylus and started drawing for the first time in almost two weeks, so I figured I may as well go ahead and get this posted as well.
This week, meet the Pixie Fiend. Anyone that's read fantasy literature knows that the faerie folk are already incedibly evil. Adding a fiendish template to them is just overkill. But here we go.
This here is my entry for the weekly Splinterlands Art contest which can be found at THIS PARTICULAR LOCATION IN CYBERSPACE
Huh. I was just about to download and show an image of what the orginal Pixie Fiend sprite looks like, but that entire tab of the Splintercards site appears to no longer be there. Ah, it was just a game sprite sized image anyway. It's a pixie, it's a fiend. You all get it, right?
Created using Clip Studio Paint Pro on my portable art studio which consists of a Microsoft Surface Pro 7+. Here is the time lapse video:
https://rumble.com/v6zwus0-pixie-fiend.html?mref=18dagn&mc=d3obe
And here are a series of process drawings in case you do not have super speed and just want to follow along with the video like Bob Ross on amphetamines...
Step One: The Rough Draft. I started using a 40-px Pastel brush, then just decided to skip ahead and start using a 20-px Mechanical Pencil. I was in a hurry, after all this had to fit into a 30-second video.
Step Two: Line art. I drew this two weeks ago, so I can't remember which brush I used for the line art. Probably about a 20-px G-Pen brush for the outline of the figure. Then about half that size for the details on the interior of the figure and also for the wings. It looks like this:
Step Three: Flat layer. First I hide the rough layer, then use the magic wand tool to select everything that is not part of the figure. I then used the paint bucket tool to fill the entire image in one layer. This makes the flat layer much cleaner than trying to select all the interior parts of the figure and filling it with paint. I used what I hope looks like gross, gray flesh tone. You decide for yourself:
Step Four: Colors. I used the paint bucket tool to fill in everything on a new layer that is not gross, gray flesh.
Step Five: Shading. This takes the most time. I've started using a technique in my Kickman comic that I'm using something similar here. I have two shading layers that are both clipped, multiply layers. The first just has very large swaths of shadow using the airbrush tool. Next I go in and make a cell shading layer, but I think I gave up doing that with this figure and just started painting some gray tones for shadows. If you watch the video, you can see that I originally started doing the cell shading with a cube brush, I think I was ging for a more pixelated look since the original source image was a game sprite. But then I got bored with that and just blended all the shadows in with a scrub brush.
Step Six: Background. I used NightCafe image generator for the background. I had it make a "haunted garden" then had to zoom way in to a small portion of it, because Pixies tiny. I like how there is a fallen garden gnome for scale. I also ran the image through an artistic filter in clip studio to make it look less like a photograph. I think I've settled on a good filter to simplify AI-generated art, to add in the same fat line work that I've been using on my figures. Also, I usually adjust the saturation way down and lighten the background so it hopefully doesn't distract too much from my Pixie Fiend. You decide.
Step Seven: Highlights. I created an overlay layer to add some pale reflected light. Using a light gray for the reflected light. And that should just about do it for this week.
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