Splinterlands Art Contest - Week 357 - Byzantine Kitty

Hey there, all. I hope you're having a wonderful time. It's been such a week, and it is time again for my Splinterlands Art Contest submission. This week, I wanted to go back to one of the OG Legendary summoners - the Byzantine Kitty. Despite her cute looks, she was (and still is) one of the most fearsome summoners with her useful set of abilities.

After having tried out a new art style for my previous fan art, I wanted to go back to where I am most comfortable - the usual drawing style. So, Byzantine Kitty looked like a comfortable choice for that purpose. Still, even though I was drawing her like any other day and painting, I did add a few bits and pieces here and there to avoid making it a carbon copy of any of my other drawings, you know - for creativity and uniqueness' sake.

Anyway, this is it for the overview of this piece. With that out of the way, I'll be going over the important steps I took to draw this piece.

The Process

As always, I started off by adding the flat colors I wanted to use in my drawing. I did avoid using too many for starters, but then I ended I using too many generic colors and nothing that really caught the eyes.

So, in the next step, I filled up the canvas with more vibrant and eye-catching colors to breathe more life into the drawing. I also took the time to add more detail to her hair, since that's a big part of the drawing, and we don't want to offend our lovely kitty's fur. Also, her eyes would've looked too boring if I had used that tone of red that I had used in the previous image, so, like before, I settled for something that added more contrast to the whole picture and went with a somewhat dark-ish blue. (and stars in the middle just like the original art.)

I worked some more on the outlines of her hair and proceeded to work on the unattended parts of the drawing - her clothes and accessories. I added some shadows and highlights to give more depth and volume to her appearance - kinda like a 3D object.

In this step, I amplified the glows and added some colors that were missing, like her lipstick and her red cheeks. With the final glows on her clothes and body, she was starting to take her final shape.

In this step, I progressed her hair's finalization even more. I did what I had done to the rest of the painting - defined which parts had to be darkened by shadows and which ones had to be highlighted in the light, and then amplified them to give them more depth just like before, but something was missing in the end.

The Result

Last but not least, I added the usual final particle and effect in the end. I felt like the area around her hair and in the background looked somewhat empty, and needed some of the usual final touches, so I added a tiara on her hair as well as some pulse-like magic around as if she's activating her power, along with some glowy particles it give the final result some of that wham. And as the final touches for her hair, I added the usual highlights of white strands, before which her hair looked somewhat plain and dull, but look at her now - she looks fabulous, and I'm content with how the final result turned out.

Original Game Art

And lastly, as for the original card(tho I doubt she'd need it, considering how popular she is):

And as always, I'll be looking forward to reading your thoughts and suggestions in the comment section down below. Good luck to those participating in this week's contest. I'll be seeing you all again in next week's contest... cheers~~