Splinterlands Weekly Art Challenge - Week 179 - Darkest Mage

Hello everyone,

here is my entry to this week's Splinterlands Weekly Art Challenge

Today I embark on a journey to improve my art and will share the first step with all of you. I got myself a new sketchbook and my intent is to try and learn how to do quick sketches in order to start doing more studies to improve my art. I have always done my art with a lot of attention to the fine detail and because of that every piece I made was a HUGE time sink in the ball park of 15+ hours of drawing. This is not an ideal way to improve on the things that I lack, it sure does produce a nice result but it's hard to practice new mediums, new poses etc.

On to the piece of the day, my inspiration is the Darkest Mage original card art, I really like the color scheme and the way the characters blends in the shadow as it looks like he is drawing power from it it's a really cool effect, kudos to the artist that came up with it!

Keeping with the intent I had I started off with a really rough and messy sketch with a 2H pencil, not bothering to erase anything just going over correcting stuff on the fly.

My focus was to capture the pose and the proportions (which I did not do a good job of but will do better next time) I was aiming to do the original pose of the art at first but then, seeing my composition I came up with a different idea to move things around and challenge myself even more, because with changing the pose and the overall composition I had to change the whole light source and hence all the shading.

After some doodling around and even taking a picture of myself in the mirror to use as a reference how should the hand be looking stretched and holding the staff this is the refined sketch. At this time I liked the composition and I scrapped the original plan to go purely for a pencil sketch because as I mentioned I really liked the colors used in the original piece and decided to refine it a bit more by adding color so I went for it.

Here is the very first light blue which I found suited as a base color and went over the whole figure with it. Then I went in as fast as I could to refine it as much as I could, I ended up moving the spell effect a little so to not leave all that much negative space on the bottom left corner and I really like the final result.

And here it is even though it was not as fast as I intended it to be it was a huge improvement over what it usually takes me to do a piece. I really like the pose I went for and the result, I hope I also did a good job with reversing the light source and moving it lower. As a note for myself and a point for improving I found that hands are a weak point of mine and will try to improve on that in the future.

I hope that you like the result and I would love it if someone got any tips on improvement I should focus on or anything at all. Thank you if you took the time out of the day to check out my post, have an amazing day, stay creative and keep smiling !