Fungus Flinger fanart for Splinterlands Art Contest!

Hello guys!

I'm here with a new entry for the Splinterlands Art Contest of this week. Like I promised last time I focused on a creature which doesn't follow human like anatomy.

FUNGUS FLINGER

Just like the name this guy throws sticky fungus bombs on his opponents which makes them blind and grounds the airborne opponents. Not just that even I death they are useful because they release spores to power up allies in his vicinity. That's convenient. That power reminds me of one of the cards in Clash Royale game.

THE IDEA 💡

As you can see above, in my version I made him a lot younger by removing some baggy wrinkles and yellow glow in the eyes along with other anatomical changes which makes the character looks like it's in a growing stage using the tree stump as food source. Flingers are usually seen in forest near rotting organic things so I used an old rotting tree stump here to show it's growth. I felt like that wasn't enough because the original one has fungus balls as extras so I read about mushrooms a bit and saw that mushrooms are just fruiting bodies like flowers so the real body which is called mycelium is hidden as a survival strategy. The Mushrooms are formed when the conditions are right to release spores into the atmosphere for more growth. So with that new knowledge I decided to add extra mushrooms near the roots of the tree stump as if the mycelium is spread extensively inside the stump and it has produced more mushrooms outside different parts of the stump to release spores. That's what I used here to make the whole painting. It was new knowledge is this was rather interesting to make :)

THE PROCESS

First I looked for a stump reference since my idea needs that to work. I decided to look for a nice one since I'll be getting a huge headache when I created it form memory. After that I drew the Flinger in a way that its roots have already fused inside the tree stump making it as it's food source until it becomes the fully mobile Flinger again for battle.

Drawing Flinger was the easy part however the tree stump shading and background took some time to complete. The light source of from left top side so I painted the Flinger, tree stump and the vegetation in a way that its shading is respecting the source of light which is a huge thing when it comes to paintings with strong lighting. After the tree stump shading was done I painted the vegetation on and around it using coarse brush and leaf brush to fill the gaps and to create the illusion of forest around it. Followed the same style of lighting here as well like i mentioned above. After that I moved on to adding the details on the body of the Flinger using dots which help resemble the texture of some mushrooms. I did the same things on its extensions as well. The secondary extensions here is being utilised for seeding so I used airbrush to draw the spores. You can only see the spores individually in close up like dirt flying but since it's being seen from a distance it'll look like a gas so airbrush is enough for this. After that the lighting from the left side was added using airbrush and some highlights were later added into the tree stump to enhance the lighting. I also painted the right side of the Flinger lineart in white to show the strong lighting which is doing really well here.

THE RESULT

App used: Ibis paint x

Duration: 7hrs

Reference

Thank you so much for your time 😊