Splinterlands Art Contest Week 276: Javelin Thrower

This is my entry for the weekly Splinterlands Art Contest found HERE

From the Splinterlands Wiki: https://splinterlands.fandom.com/wiki/Javelin_Thrower

The Javelin Throwers are an especially savage small tribe of female warriors who live in the Giant Grasslands of Primordia. Well known for wearing suits made from the skins of reptiles they kill, these wild women are rarely seen in any settlement or city.

Created in Clip Studio Paint Pro on a Surface Pro 4. Here is the time lapse video:

And here is the drawing broken down into individual process steps:

Reference photo from the internet:

One: Rough Draft. I changed the angle slightly because instead of throwing for distance I wanted her to look like she is leaping up and throwing either straight forward or slightly down at her target.

Two: Line art.

Three: Create a flat layer for the skin tone (just because that is the "deepest" layer).

Four: Make separate color layers for bone, leather, scales, and hair.

Five: Shading!

Six: More shading!! And little details like the whites of the eyes and her teeth. Tiny things that don't get their own color layer.

Six and a half: Used Nightcafe image generator to make a swamp background. It gave me this result:

Seven: I wanted a darker background for my swamp so I zoomed way in on a section. Also blurred the background and toned down the color saturation so that my javelin thrower isn't lost in the background. Also added zoom greenigh-yellow highlights on the skin and scales.

Eight: Final touches. Used a watercolor brush on a new layer to add some sunbeams shining through the tree canopy and sign my initials at the bottom. Done. Pau. Finis.