Splinterlands Art Contest! // Week 177 - Zyvax Vuul

Hello everyone,
here is my entry to the Splinterlands Art Contest: Link to the contest

Ever since chaos legion came out I am really liking this card's art, just the expression and the pose look so mad and powerful. The Splinterlands artists outdid themselves again on this one and in my oppinion it looks amazing! I hope that my take on it managed to capture the essence.

The reference is the original art of the card:

This time I went on an A4 watercolor paper and the intention was to do a mixed media piece, but it fell through.

After doing this initial sketch and it was time for some color I decided to test the paper and sadly found out it doesn't hold water very well and buckles really badly, so I scrapped the idea of doing a mixed media watercolor/ colored pencils and went solely on colored pencils. I wanted to do a nice wash as a background to make it a bit more homogenous but that's that.

It was time to choose some colors for the piece so I did a quick swatch on the supplies at my disposal

This is the time to mention I got a new set of pencils - the Faber-Castell Black Edition, still not artist quality but much better than the original children ones I've been using before.

It is time to get into layering an initial very light base color for the whole piece:

Starting to flesh it out a little bit more by marking the darkest areas and starting to add some detail to the face and hands as they are the center of the piece

A few hours in and I am starting to think the drawing is taking shape nicely and I managed to capture the expression, which is good.

At this point I am for sure more than 12 hours in but I didn't really keep good track of it because it was done over several days stretched over a whole week. I am going in a bit more boldly to get the darker areas as dark as possible and at this point I really like the pencils, they mix well and I am able to get a lot of layers in.

And here is the final piece, I really like the end result and hope that all of you will too. It took quite longer than I expected it to, but I really enjoyed the whole process.

Materials used:
A4 watercolor paper
2H pencil for the initial sketch
Faber-Castell Black Edition colored pencils
Faber-Castell fineliners used very little for some of the darkest and sharpest lines

Thank you if you took the time out of your day to check out my post, have an amazing day, stay creative and keep smiling!