Octavia

Happy 5th Anniversary to Splinterlands

And what better way to celebrate this anniversary than giving love to the characters of this land and painting them while they poison their adversaries, is the best celebration I could think of.

Octavia Shadowmeld is a character I've been wanting to paint for months since I saw the amazing version made by Hive account@yanes94, just before writing this I went to see it once again and I'm still impressed by what he achieved with this character, so I tried to do my best making a scene in 16: 9 just for a good background, representing Octavia in the middle of the perdition of her enemies because of her poison "Nocturne", developed by Klaansmyrt and destined to cause panic and a suffocating death, just like those knights that unfortunately are breathing this toxic air in my painting.

Play Splinterlands Now❕

Tools:

Gaomon S620
Photoshop
Brushes courtesy of Imad Awan: Download here

🔰Process🔰

_Reference

-Step 1:

From the sketch I wanted Octavia to be very close to the camera, but not exactly in the middle of the scene as I wanted to represent her enemies choking on her poison. I also wanted to achieve the feeling of depth immediately at the beginning of the painting, so just below the sketch I outlined the shape of Octavia, the suffocated soldiers and the poison tank with a blue color to make it stand out among so much gray.

-Step 2:

From the previous shape of Octavia, I divided in new layers each of the elements that conform it, having individual layers for the skin, the clothes and the mask, this helps me to paint more easily without worrying about ruining any other unwanted area, all thanks to the layer lock, so once everything was divided I could apply the base colors and immediately give them some intermediate colors to get some volume, especially in the clothes.

-Step 3:

I've always said, I'm bad for backgrounds in my paintings, but this time it was completely necessary to make a closed place, so that the Nocturne gas doesn't dissipate easily and his enemies really suck it, so I spent a few hours making a room with a medieval look, but I didn't want everything to be in darkness so I established two light entrances to make Octavia contract and give her more prominence in the scene.

-Step 4:

I continued working on the room, with the symmetry tool I made the lattice of the window literally making random lines, and better illuminated the light swallower on the ceiling. I also focused again on Octavia, this time I finally built her fighting claws and from them I let the Nocturne emanate which filled the room with a strong blue color that envelops the soldiers in the background, this gas allowed me to fill much of the scene and also give a very striking color to the painting.

-Step 5:

The final step is full of many details that had to be added, my dream has always been to make splash art like the ones in league of legends, but this requires too much patience and time, plus a pc that can handle tons of new layers, I ended up using 95 layers, because every time I wanted to add something more to the scene I did it in a new layer to avoid ruining something else. This way I improved the skin, I drew the spiral marks using the multiply blending mode, I used a brush in the "linear dodge" blending mode to make all the shiny edges on the clothes and finally I gave hair to Octavia, which I used to cover her ear since I was too lazy to paint it.

I also looked for references of people suffocating and to my surprise I found a few on google, so I used them to make the two knights who have succumbed to the Nocturne gas, one of them is kneeling choking, and the other knight I have painted him paralyzed with fear next to the big window. I have achieved something that I really like and I hope you like it a lot too.😁

Octavia

I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.