River Nymph Artwork for Splinterlands Art Contest

Splinterlands Art Contest

Hello and welcome back to my new blog!

Honestly, guys, I wasn't gonna participate this week. I was getting sick continuously for the past two weeks. I wasn't really in the right mind to draw anything. I did try to draw some but none of them was good. All of them had some sort of anatomy issues which made me more annoyed. Two days ago I visited a new doctor and it looks like the medicines are working so I started drawing yesterday and It turned out pretty good.

I selected River Nymph to draw this time, an official design. All the drawings I made so far had a human colour palette. I wanted to try something different this time and River Nymph was perfect for it since her skin, hair and eyes were all blue in different shades.

My Design

Official Design

Source

The Process

This drawing was my 5th attempt to create art for this week XD. I'm glad that I was able to finish it. Before painting, I watched some YouTube videos of people painting. I don't know why but it always gives me the motivation and energy to draw one for myself.

As usual, I started with the skin. I was a bit overwhelmed because it was blue this time so I have to adjust the shadows and lighting to this colour. Usually, when I draw the nose, I paint the lower end of the nose reddish-orange but now I can't do that and had to rely only on blue shades. It did work out though so I'm happy with the results.

I did something different with the eyes this time. Usually, I just add highlights under the pupil and shadows above and that works well but I wanted to go for a bit more realistic approach this time. I used penfade on add layer to create that overlapping strokes of light on the iris. The next step was to blend the edges with the white part of the eye and that was it. Of course, I added the highlights as well haha. Without it, the eyes won't be shiny. The head is very important to me because if it looks ugly then I won't move forward haha. When it looks good it gives me confidence that the painting is worth finishing.

As for the hair, I did something different as well. I applied a technique I saw on some viral YouTube shorts. I don't usually add this many strokes to the hair but I decided to test this new technique anyway and this was the result. She also had a muted yellowish crown on her head but the official design doesn't seem to suit my style so I decided to make a new one for her. I did make it look more metallic in the early stages but because of the background, I decided to make it white so that the glow can be applied.

The final stage was creating the background. This was tough. I tested many background designs and this was the one I liked the most. There were too many WIP shots. I didn't want to add all that in here. The idea for the background was a nymph sitting near the banks of the river around some plants. Sounds easy, right? But it was far from the truth XD. The easy part was drawing some bushes in complementary to the blue nymph hence I chose magenta. The plain background was a gradient mix of blue and magenta as well. After adding some highlights on the water and shadows on top to create the distance the background was completed. The final step was to add some splash of water near the river banks to create a more realistic effect. I was very satisfied with the background this time. It looks very good with the character design because of the complimentary factor in it.

I hope you guys like it so I'll see you guys in my next blog :)

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Tools used

• Ibis paint X
• Notebook and pencil

Duration: 9hrs

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Thank you so much for your time 🐼