Father and Son

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.