This art work was done for the splinterlands fan art contest, which you can see here. https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/splinterlands-art-contest-week-344
Commander Slade is a fantastic card, both the stats and the artwork. I thought this before I started working on this piece now, I'm an even bigger fan. I love the fact his sword has not one but two teethy mouths on it. Part of why I enjoy doing splinterlands fanart so much is that so many characters have such delightful artwork.
I did this work in a cellshaded style, which isn't my usal way of arting, but I find it fun to do cause it breacks the drawing process into distinct stages and forces one to not be stuck in endless blending and such, which is something I'm really bad for.
While there are aspects of the finished work that I think could def be better, I am overall really happy with this. (like the hands. Hands are hard okay)
I ended up switching to the guardian stuck far back to show they are well into the back ranks :) I also started doing the
How it began
I knew I wanted to do something in the water splinter, so I gathered many of the lore pictures and lots of pictures with lots of water.
I also did thumbnails. This is a process I use to turn a vague idea less vague. By drawing some ideas extremely roughly I both get an idea of them, how well I think I can pull them off and how fun I think they would be. I often end up doing a combination of multiple thumbnails.
Thumbnails done its time to get to work on the actual drawing. I knew I wanted Slade and the flying squid because they're amongst my most used water splinter cards. And the Alpine Skink whose a favourite as well, already got a drawing. I was playing with the Pelcor bandit looking like he was gonna be diving in but decided against it later.
I ended up switching to the guardian stuck far back to show they are well into the back ranks :) I also started doing the line work. This is super important in this style as shoddy line work is gonna make the whole thing look shoddy. (And I gotta pratice my line work more. I also started doing some blocking to get a sense of how much space stuff should take up.
A whole lot got tweaked, and I am still not quite happy with Slade's sword. It looks wrong. I also shifted things so the squid is distinctly behind Slade as I think it adds to the work and it shows how dang long the Squids tentacles are. (It does have reach after all)
And this being decent also means I got to start doing my favorite part, colouring! One thing I found with Slade is that the colour scheme was hella fun. I also still really needed to make the sword look better.
I then started doing the shading. With cell shading there is ussally a few different colours used for the darks. And no real blending. This makes it easier to make things look heckin dramatic as well as forcing the artist to go "Yes this is exactly where the shadow is.
I changed the composition a little here. I added a tentacle that was reaching out more and made the guardian smaller so she looked further back.
I added some shading/highlights and a wee bit of colour variation to the squid next. Which I think made them look far more fierce. I was also trying to think about how I'd work in the water more.
I was going to keep the linework on the water but decided that it looked better without it.
Then I finnally did the details on Meerdali.
and I fixed Slade's sword.
Then did some more tweaks and called it done. Partly cuase I felt it was about as good as I could do and partly cause I get bored after 15+ hours of working on the same thing.
Thank you for reading, if you want to see more artwork please follow me!
