Small Talk:

Now that I'm getting used to drawing digitally using a drawing tablet, I dared to do something harder. Last week's drawing, Lily and Friends, was just a trial and now comes the test of how much I can transfer my traditional drawing skills to digital.

I'm still more comfortable with drawing animals than people so I chose another Splinterlands unit that has animal features. I chose Arkemis the Bear. I tried to make it as close as possible to the original art while making tiny adjustments to give my own twist to it. I hope you would like it.

For this fan art, let's use the new program that I am practicing on, Krita. It's an open-source software, meaning you can download it for free. There's also a paid version with more tools and filters but the free one will suit you just as fine as well.

Process:

Draft and Lineart:

For this art, since there's a lot of tiny details, I'll be using this special pen, Ink-4 Pen Rough. The pointer looks weird but after a few test, you will get used to it. I like using this compared to the normal one because of the uneven lines. This makes my work a bit unique, although it may come with a bit of drawback.

Make sure the pen size is around 7 px. I don't use a lot of pressure when drawing so this would only look 1-2 px. I found this pen very good for those who likes drawing while exerting light pressure.

Other Tips and more venting

Important Tip: If you are using Krita and you resized your canvas, make sure you "Save As" and save it as a new file. When Krita resized canvas, it doesn't use the same save file that you opened. Instead, it creates a backup file that looks like "file_name.kra~"

The problem is that if you close the original file and opened the backup, any layers (called "Nodes" in Krita) under a folder/group will be merged. Every hidden layers/nodes, when merged gets deleted so make sure you do this everytime you resized your canvas in Krita.

I learned all of this from experience and that's why as you can see, I don't have any guide lines in this week's art. My guide lines was merged with the other guides I use and only the original Arkemis the Bear guide that I am using is the only one that survived.

I did not expect how detail Arkemis could be. At first, I thought he was simple despite the glittering golds. I did not expect that everything he wear is fur and the lines always have to break because it's fur. A bit frustrating since I am taking more time than I anticipated but I hope the end will be worth the effort.

Coloring Starts

Now that I'm done venting and managed to redo my lineart, let's continue with the coloring starting from the mouth and applying base colors.

Clothes Shadow and Highlights

In this art, I applied a personal coloring style I like to call, "3 color style". This is a beginner friendly and very effective style where you get one base color, a lighter shade of that for the highlights and a darker shade of the base color for shadows.

Belt Shadow and Highlights

This is probably the proudest part of my work. It was unexpected that the belt turned out super awesome after applying shadows and highlights to it.

Krita also gave me an easier time than when using Photoshop because of the three lines below the color range. You can manipulate these sliders to give you the highlight and shadows you need for your art. What's good about this is that because it's based on your main color base, whatever your shadows and highlights that you choose from the slider will look good on your work.

The only thing you need to consider when doing this is how much lighter or how much darker you want the highlights and shadows of your art. This saved me a lot of time because normally, you need to think and look at color theory and other complicated things to know what colors are compatible. With this slider, you don't need to know that for highlights and shadows.

Other Highlights and Shadows

I won't be doing one by one for the rest because it has the same concept. These are the highlights and shadows for the gold accessories, belt and boots.

Let's Make Some Fire

For the fire, I started with a base blue, then applied two highlights one getting smaller than the last. Then, below the base blue layer, I added a darker, more vibrant blue that would look like a border for the flames. I added this because I thought the fire was too light and I want to show off the bluish fire, not white.

Background

Initially, I wanted to create a proper background for it but after a few trials, I cannot get the feel that I want. So, I took some idea online and found out about speed lines. I changed the background color to black and added white speed lines to create a more intense atmosphere.

This was perfect as it gave me the feel I want.

Timelapse

Original Art

Character image taken from Splinterlands, drawn using Krita and animated using Photoshop.

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