Splinterlands Social Media Challenge!
Hello guys, I decided to participate for this week's social media challenge hehe. I wanted to use this opportunity to go back to my old cell shading style as well so I looked through some of the splinter cards and decided to draw Magi because glow is involved in his design and it goes perfectly well with cell shading if done right. I hope it's done right XD. Well, here it is and I hope you like it 😜.
Magi Necrosi
Process...
As I mentioned above I picked Magi for drawing so the next step was to find a proper pose for this guy. I went straight to deviant art this time because pose reference from Pinterest is giving me a hard time these days lol. So I scrolled through some cool pose references from Pose Archives and found a cool pose with good hand position which was great to add the source of glow. I started drawing the rough sketch and drew our Magi in this new pose. That was done pretty quickly because Magi doesn't have a face hmmm. He reminds me of He-man's friend Orko who is also a wizard. Maybe it's a rule to hide the face according to wizard community or they thought it was cool to just show the glowing eyes to show an intimidating effect hehe. Anyway, I sometimes wonder if people still remember that cartoon because back then the term anime was non existent to me XD.
So after finishing the sketch the lineart was made and colouring began. I decided to use a different colour pallette for this bad boy because I like to experiment you know. Sometimes things get interesting and end up with a good result and maybe I'll learn from that as well. Since it's cell shading blending is not required but it also depends on the person I suppose. The glow was forming in his right hand so the left side of the body will be darker because of the lack of light. I shaded his body accordingly and got that nice contrast which shows the effect of a strong light source. This is what makes the painting interesting. I added a second layer of light as shadows as well because I wanted to make it look a bit more detailed. The eyes were fun to draw especially the scattering effect around it. I just duplicated the eye layer twice and place one above and another one below in 10% opacity near the main eyes and painted a green glow there with airbrush which was later changed to blue because pink and blue are complimentary so it was a better choice in my opinion hehe.
Since the light was coming from the left side I decided to make it more obvious by adding a trim light near different area of his body. It was missing something so I decided to make the trim light glow as well so I duplicated the layer and applied a Gaussian blur on it and that improved the glow factor around the light source. This is usually done with an airbrush but since there were so much lines to paint I decided that it's better to do it all at once.
Next up was the background. I painted it in dark pink since the glow is more visible in a dark environment and dark pink colour was used because even in a dark room, a colored light source leves a tint of whatever colour is producing around the room. It barely noticeable sometimes but it's there. This is optional but I like to paint it that way because I think it looks more cool when we follow the rules of light properly. Now then, the most unexpected part while painting this artwork was those pink clouds underneath him. I was thinking about either drawing his lower body or just hiding it something else but suddenly the Master of Illusion Mysterio came to my mind and he is surrounded by these clouds/ smoke around it so I decided to paint that here to give Magi a bit more intimidating look. I'm glad it worked out because I don't really draw clouds or smoke that much so I had my doubts but for some reason the smudge tool worked well this time lol. Special thanks for smudge tool for not being a pain this time lol. I painted some highlights on the smoke as well to complete the light effect and the painting was finally done and was ready to shared here. I hope you guys enjoyed the process and I'll be back with something new in a few days hehe.
Official Art
Result
Tools used: Ibis paint x, Notebook and Pencil
Duration: 5hrs
Pose reference source
If you want to delve into the intriguing characters of Splinterlands, you can check out their official website where you'll find detailed information about the game. If you have a particular interest in a specific card, you can click on this link to see It's characteristics and additional information
Thank you for your time😊