Splinterlands Art Contest

Hello everyone~~ ^^ How are you?
I’m back with my entry for the Splinterlands Art Contest ^^ For this week’s contest, I decided to draw “Sergeant Grauzral” portrait.
I usually choose the cards that the female characters look so feminine in it but this time I chose a card that the character looks more masculine. She has large arms and looks so strong and powerful. I also loved her style in overall. And I was so curious to see how she would look like if she was more slim and looking like a lady. So I started drawing the portrait with a sketch of a girl and then drawing the remarkable features of the character. I drew the hair just like the original character because she has a unique hair style and I didn’t want to change that to some regular hair style.
I drew her clothes like the original art but removed some part of it because that style was not very feminine.
When I finally finished the sketch, it was time to color her skin. I didn’t change her skin color to some natural skin tone so I used different shades of blue to paint her skin. After shading and highlighting her skin, I went on coloring her dress, accessories and hair. After that, I colored her facial features and then went on adding details on her hair. I drew lots of hair strands to make her hair look realistic. Then I worked more on her skin and added more highlights on her skin. After I added the gold tattoo on her forehead. The character’s accessory that I really liked was her bracelet. I liked its shape and since I didn’t drew her hand in the drawing I couldn’t draw the bracelet. Also I felt that something was missing on her body so I decided to draw the bracelet as her necklace and I really liked the result. ^^
In the end, I worked on the background and because I didn’t want to leave the background empty I decided to draw the blue magic that she created in the original art in my painting. For creating a magic that looks cool I had to use several brushes. I can to that with only one brush but it takes time so first I used a light brush to draw the ball and the lines and then duplicated the layer and set the layer on add then used a brush that we can add little circle light effect and drew lots of little lights near the lights. After that, I opened a layer under that layers and used a nebula brush to create a cool lighting. Nebula brush is so perfect for these times and comes in handy. It creates a magical effect. After that I add more bigger lights around the character and set the layer on “add”.
The other brushes I used are the same ones I shared in my last posts. I used a soft air brush and hard air brush for coloring and shading the skin, hair and the rest and for drawing the hair strands I used a hair brush. I also use a light brush to draw the single hair strands to make it look more detailed. One brush that I used for adding some little details on her earring was a glitter brush. I love this brush so much. ^^
I really liked working on this portrait of “Sergeant Grauzral“ and I hope you also liked it as much as I did. What should I drew for the next week’s contest? ^^

Now let’s see the progress ^^