Splinterlands Fanart Naga Assassin

Hello fellow Hivians! My apologies that it has been such a long time since I posted on my blog. There is no 'real' excuse other than that work has been extra busy after my vacation and things happening in Ukraine did the rest to ensure that any creative or blogging juices were pretty much non-existent.

I started this Splinterlands fanart of the reward card: Naga Assassin exactly four weeks ago and according to Procreate it took me 19 hours to complete it. Yup, that definitely confirms that I'm a slow painter - LOL.

Let's just say I had a couple of issues with the pose I chose. 1) her left arm - originally, and you see it in the first few pics of the gif below, I wanted that arm pulled back the dagger also pointing back - that just didn't happen. I changed and erased and painted and changed but it still looked just awful. So, in the end, she is holding the dagger as if she is stabbing someone. 2) Her open mouth, the lower half of her face - I had the painting 99 % done but I just wasn't happy with that part of her face. Solution - facial surgery! I painted over everything below her nose and remodeled it. I think it now looks a lot better.

This is a digital painting that I created on my iPad Pro in Procreate app. It was a very loose sketch at first, the coiled-up snake body of her in a somewhat dynamic pose.

From there I blocked out the main colors and added shadows and highlights. Then I started detailing the face, I always love painting eyes, pupils - please check out the close-up of her face below.

Then it was time for a dynamic yet not distracting background. In the gif you see that I went through different color iterations in the process, settling on the dark green version as a contrast to the red of the naga assassin. I blurred parts of it to make the character and stylized speed lines stand out more.

Once I had that done I took a little time away from the painting to come back with fresh eyes. That is when I noticed that I really didn't care much for the mouth and ear in their position. So, I did the mentioned remodeling. Luckily it is a digital painting so I had the character on a separate layer from the background.

The last detail that I added in but hadn't planned on from the beginning was the third dagger that is being held by her tail end. Snakes can hang on their little tail ends from trees (or anything else) and pull their whole body up again, so I thought as a naga assassin a sneaky third dagger in her tail would totally make sense.