Wood Nymph | My entry for Splinterlands art contest for this week!

Splinterlands art contest!

Hello everyone, I hope everyone is having a productive day. As for me I'm having a great day as well hehe. If you have been following me then you know that I have been skipping the weekly contest because of the burnout from last month due to continuous drawing but I'm glad it's over now hopefully haha. I felt supercharged after taking some rest so I decided to draw something close to realism this time as my entry for this week. I think I managed to create something interesting this time. This reminds me of my entry Draconissa, I had next level motivation when I was painting it. I'm glad that I could channel back that energy again today. Here is my entry and enjoy the process below :)

Wood Nymph

The process...

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First of all, I like to apologise for adding too much work in progress shots xd. I made many decisions while making the artwork so I had to do it. As you can see in my version the character looks different in various physical aspects. I didn't want to just follow the card design and be done with it this time. When I saw the card I saw the potential in creating an interesting version of it with some extras from my side. Luck was on my side this time because I found the perfect reference image for this artwork. For some reason the rough sketch also came out pretty well just like my Draconissa painting. Coincidence perhaps? Maybe or maybe not. This is my first semi NSFW drawing since I started painting digitally I think and I'm glad it worked out well in the end.

The process is quite similar as usual. I started painting on the character on my Ibis app after making clean lineart. Notice that I changed the skin tone to green instead of the official colour. That was the first change while making this painting. The next thing you notice is that instead of hair I decided to add vines on her head since she is a character based on nature. I did add lots of leaves on her hair at first but after creating the background I knew it was too much so I removed them and added new small vines protruding from the big ones. This is the last thing I did while painting this character haha.

I spend a lot of time detailing the body so I decided to ditch the clothes which basically covers all the hard work that I did in here and replaced them with vines instead. I did cover up the private areas with those vines and leaves. This is why I mentioned semi NSFW earlier haha. I hope I don't get in trouble for this. Earlier I painted the sclera of her eyes white but I noticed that later it was black so I changed it to the official design accordingly. I think it was best to keep it black since the blue iris is very visible and vibrant now.

I didn't know if I could blend properly because there was too much to render in here. It's a good thing that I discovered lasso tool last time. Even though the edges after removing selection tool looked cracked I was easily able to fix and blend it with blur tool. I added as much details as I acn in there this time. Usually I get confused while rendering the fist but it came out pretty good this time. I used a lot of layers while doing all this. Without it I'd probably had a serious problem finishing this painting. So glad I bought the tab, it can open lots of layers as I need hehe.

Almost forgot to draw the elf ears on this one. I painted that after finishing the background. What to paint in the background was obvious so I experimented a lot with different things. In the end I decided to keep all of them xd. When I used them all together it looked like a forest. I did blur the background though since I want to focus the attention to the character here and also because it's far away. The front part of the background was done with different types of leaf brush. I added a light source from top with sun rays coming out of it so I painted the vegetation in respect to the source of light here. Oh, I totally forgot, if you look at the original design there is water under her feat so I decided to make her stand in a pond in my version giving a nod to the official one. Finally, I decided to add some blue flowers in the pond and applied glow technique on it for the magical feel. Now the trio of primary colours was complete since the flower on her hair is red hehe. I hope you liked the painting and the process.

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Official Design

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The Result

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Tools used: Ibis paint X, notebook and pencil.

Duration: 15hrs

Pose reference

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Thank you so much for your time 😊