 As the corrupted Varian goes for the finishing blow, Anduin reaches out desperately for his last card in his deck. The one card that can keep him alive and awaken his father from his madness. A little lore tid-bit for those who don't play Warcraft/Hearthstone: In the WoW universe, King Varian Wrynn is the leader of the Alliance and Prince Anduin Wrynn is his son. In Hearthstone, Varian is a Warrior-only card, which leaves him under the command of Garrosh Hellscream, former warchief of the Horde and overall bad-guy. I thought it'll be fun to see the duel between the father and the son.  I started with a gestural drawing. As with the Ysera painting, I decided to loosely follow the golden ratio for the composition. Note how I tried to play up the dynamic perspective initially.  Added some details to the sketch. For this artwork, I decided to flesh out most of the details in the painting stage rather than in the lineart. This decision will prove to cost me quite a bit of revision time.  For the color scheme, I decided to go with something more sunset-sy to draw out the drama of the battle. I chose to have a desert/dry land as the battlefield to match the yellow board of Hearthstone.  In the past, I used to immediately start detailing isolated areas of the painting after the initial color scheme phase. I found that doing a medium detail pass is actually very beneficial for the painting. It sets the lighting and being able to quickly define the characters' facial features boosts my confidence to push forward.  My new laptop has a very saturated color display. When I compared my image on my secondary monitor, I noticed how dull my initial color scheme was. I quickly fix it before proceeding on.  With all the preliminary work done, I started working on the details.  Fixing the ground and background elements.  Detailing Anduin.  Fur and hair details and Varian's sword.  At this point, I was pretty satisfied with the painting. I posted on the LevelUp! group and my friend's comment was that the foreshortening on Varian looked wonky. His legs looked too big and disproportionate to his other body parts.  I merged all layers and moved stuff around. I think the legs looks more acceptable now and was ready to post the final image online. But after one night's rest, his left arm looked too long for me.  This is the final iteration.. I think.
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More inktober sketches  This drawing is dedicated to the two office dogs in my workplace. The daily grind is easier to endure with the presence of these two puppies. Tried to play around with positive/negative spaces. Not too happy with the results.  A drawing of my favourite scene in Star Wars. Watch the scene here.  Inspired by my visit to the Northwest Trek WIldlife Park in Washington.  Also inspired by my visit to the Northwest Trek WIldlife Park in Washington. Expect to see more animal related sketches in the next few days too.
I finally found some time to do Inktober! Here are my day 1 and 2 entries:  I went on a road trip with friends to Portland, Oregon this past Saturday. I'm blessed to find friends to travel together on a foreign land.  Tomorrow will be my first dental visit in 6 years... not looking forward to it.
 Ysera is the Aspect of Green Dragons, and is the gatekeeper of the Emerald Dream. Ysera is green, and her skin glitters with countless emeralds for scales. Her physical form is ghostly, ethereal, like watching a living dream or vision. The Emerald Dream is a place where all living beings dream when sleeping. It is a place of where sentient beings have dreams of hope, and faith for a better tomorrow. From the Emerald Dream, Ysera can observe all lesser races. Her eyes are always closed, although you can see her pupils move constantly below her eyelids as if watching many dreams at once. Lore from Hearthstone Wiki I started playing Hearthstone again after the latest expansion "The Grand Tournament" was released. This is actually one of the key reason for my disappearance that I did not mention yesterday. Since I'm a free-to-play miser, there are some cards that I wished I had. One of them is Ysera; the card design is just so cool! I decided to do a fanart of her to restart my personal art routine. Process I started with a quick gestural sketch of how I wanted the image to be composted. For this particular painting, I tried to follow the golden ratio.  After I get a composition I'm fairly satisfied with, I sketch in more details of the characters. This is also the time when I started to gather more references (i.e play some Hearthstone).  After a massive losing streak in Hearthstone, I decided to go back to work on the painting. I start by filling in the general color scheme. Being a painting of the emerald dragon, the colors chosen here are pretty straight forward.    After the preliminary work, it is a case of grinding out the rest of the details. Much like grinding the ladder in Hearthstone, the process can be fun and painful at the same time. I, for one, like the monotony of painting details. The two major compositional changes here are that I opened the dragon form's mouth a little more to make it more fearsome, and I shifted the whole painting to the right because the tangent of her fingers to the left edge of the page was bugging me.  At this point in time, I thought I was done with the painting. The only problem I could see was the weird shape the cloak is making. The idea here was that the cloak shouldn't be behind her hand as I wanted to preserve the silhouette. I posted the above image in the Level Up! group and got some comments. One issue that I missed was how the right hand wasn't working. I imagined a more fore-shortened arm, but members of the group did not share my views. I tried iterating the painting based on their comments.  And here's the final form of the painting! I think that making the arm longer and less fore-shortened was a good call. I also like that the hand is no longer a clear silhouette now that it is placed in front of the cloak. This draws more attention to her face and the dragon form behind, which is the focal point of the painting.  Next I added more details on her face. Normally, I will work my paintings from the background to the foreground. But since this is a character-centric piece, I know that it is important to nail down her face as soon as possible. Getting the face right gives me confidence to carry on the rest of the painting.
It's my first post in 2 months. There are several things that resulted in my "disappearance". The crunch period in my day-job began. PAX happened. My old computer died (well, it's not dead yet but it's in a really crippled condition) and I had to purchase a new one. This left me with little time to do full paintings, so I decided to continue my fundamentals practice. Here are some of the studies and sketches I did during this time period.
Warning: Images contain nudity and is therefore NSFW |
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