Cabalist as my entry for last week's Splinterlands Art Contest!

Splinterlands Art Contest

Hello guys, I'm back from the dead😅🤞. It's been a while since I posted in here. There were some construction works happening in our house and they needed my help with some heavy lifting among other things. At the end of the day I was very tired with the lifting and cleaning so I just wanted to sleep when the work was over🥲. The good news is that the construction work is almost over and I finally found some time yesterday to finish this artwork. I selected Cabalist because he reminded me of doctor strange but with cool outfit hehe. I actually used his reference to draw him. It's not just that, I have been drawing only ladies lately and there is a shortage of men in my portfolio so this had to be done🤷. Anyway, I hope that I can join regularly from now on and have fun 😁.

Cabalist

Process

---

I started looking for some wizard poses online and found this cool Dr strange pose by luck so I decided that I should give it a try. I drew a rough sketch on a paper just to get the basic pose structure. Once I was satisfied with it I drew it digitally on Ibis app. There was some anatomy issues here and there so I fixed it while drawing the lineart. I struggled drawing this piece because I'm out of practice for a while now and on top of that I'm tired as well. I had to give my best to produce this and post it today itself. I tried drawing the head as usual and tried to render it and that didn't work as expected. After multiple tries I decided that it's best to concentrate on other parts of the body so I started with the armour on his shoulders. That did came out good so I proceeded painting other parts of his dress. If you look at the official version the colour palette is mostly in violet. I decided to do it in blue with violet glowing magic rings because these two colours will look good together.

The pose I drew below covers a part of his hand because of the cape and the hand gesture itself makes it easy to ignore rendering what's on the chest here because it's barely visible. That gave me some time to render the cape a bit more realistic way. Adding those golden stripes on different parts of the outfit was so much fun to do. The position of highlights on them brings the 3d effect even though it's drawn in a semi realistic way. The horn on the shoulder armour on the other side of the chest is dark instead of gold. I made it that way because there is a light source behind him. I painted it randomly with violet and blue until i got the shape that I wanted and applied a Gaussian blur to it. The initial idea was to paint a big magic circle infront of his palm but I ditched that idea because it's covering majority of the painting lol. So that space was kinda empty so I decided to add a glow there and added two magic circles around both of his hands like the original design. Gotta say, it's been a while since made some glow works like this. Once I added the glow rings I knew I was going in the right direction. Now what's left was to finish painting the background. I made a moon like structure behind and added sparkles around the center glow coming from his palm. Finally I came back to the face and shaded it according to the source of light. Earlier the face was rendered on basis of a top side light source but I changed it into the current one since I added a strong light source at the center now. That's about it and I'm happy to be back here. I missed you guys and I hope I can be more active in here hehe.

---

Original Design

Result

---

Tools used: Ibis paint x, Notebook and Pencil.

Duration: 10hrs

Reference source

---

Thank you so much for your time 😋