Armed Goblins riding a Battering Ram, let the party begin! | Splinterlands Contest

over 1 year ago

Happy 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣3️⃣!🎆

Yes, I know, I'm eleven days late to wish you a happy new year, but better late than never! I hope you had an amazing start of the year and that you are fulfilling all your new year's resolutions, don't give up the gym in the first week, remember that without pain there is no gain!

Among my new year resolutions, I promised myself to finish my illustrations to a point where I really like them, many times I sacrifice quality for lack of time and end up with illustrations with mistakes that maybe only I can see, but that are there to make me unhappy to see my illustrations "finished".

That's why I wanted dynamism and action in the first illustration of 2023, challenging myself with a scene where you see a daytime sky, I don't know why I almost never do scenarios in full sunlight and is something I should practice more often, so I started looking through all the Splinterlands cards thinking of those that had characters that fit together and had chemistry to make a fun scene and of course diurnal. That's why I decided to paint Battering Ram mounted by two goblins, the perfect combination for the madness to break out anywhere, and it was very funny the idea of a battering ram goat making its way with a couple of crazy goblins shooting everywhere.

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Tools:

Gaomon S620
Photoshop
Brushes courtesy of Imad Awan: Download here

🔰Process🔰

_References

-Step 1:

Since the image format is square, the ideal was to place the goat running directly towards the camera and with a goblin pointing directly at the viewer, and to denote the crazy nature of these goblins I added another one holding on to the tail of the ram, which also helps to achieve a better composition in the scene.

-Step 2:

To achieve a better volume and not go directly to the coloring, I detail all the characters in gray, many will know that I do this when I want to take my time in the illustration, it also helps me to clearly establish the direction of the lighting that I will handle for the scene, also in this specific illustration I used the grays to establish the distance between the goblins, so the goblin rider has more contrast than the goblin that is attached to the goat's tale.

-Step 3:

Now it's time to give color to the illustration, and the best way is to use the "color" blending mode applying the colors with an airbrush, this is done in order to only add the new color tones that can be only experimental without damaging the work done in gray. In my case the reason to do it this way is focused on practicing the transition from grays to warm colors and glowing blue skies, although this is not achieved only with the color blending mode, it is necessary to apply layers set to "soft light", "overlay" and sometimes even "multiply".

-Step 4:

I've been saying for a while that I wanted to practice the scenes with blue skies and daytime, but while drawing I thought that the scene would make more sense if the battering ram had just collapsed a wall, since that is its main function, so I quickly added a wall, I thought about doing the texture of the stones with the help of photobashing, but I decided to be stubborn and do it the old way, painting with a hard texture brush all over the wall

-Step 5:

Everything was already well placed and painted, but it still lacked that touch of madness and epicness to the scene, that's why I added a lot of dust and particles everywhere, plus the illumination of the goblin's guns that make everything explode with a bright pink color. And to make the characters stand out even more, with a layer of hard light I illuminated the hole in the wall, letting the yellowish light to make its way behind the disaster made by the protagonists.

I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.