Splinterlands art contest week #281 (Merdaali Giardian)

Here is a little Introduction about what Splinterlands art contest is all about . So every week Splinterlands community on Hive holds a art contest. To take part you have to draw one of there card characters from Splinterlandscards.com into your own art style.
Rules are simple one entry per week per account , no Plagiarism and no tracing someone elses art.
participants can use all art mediums to draw , sculpt or make something inspired by these characters , all creative and original ideas get curated . I too participate almost every week its a great practice and you get to learn so much as you draw along.

I always take a part in this contest to test my skills and Luck and this week for my Entry im Drawing a Card called Merdaali Guardian .

About the character now this card is a water elemental card and this is like a feral Mermaid kind of a character that has red hair , red eyes and a blue body while habing some cute Golden accessories .

After writing down and obeserving the key aspects of this character the one thing i had to do was to draw a rough sketch of it . hefe i drew a Mermaid in side view with the same jewelry and details . As the rough sketch seemed good i started to convert it into a lineart digitally.

For that i imported the sketch in a Drawing app called Medibang Paint pro and i started tracinh all the different elements on different layers one by one with a defaukt brush called pen sharp brush .

i traced the body and the hair everything looked great . Now as out lineart was finally done it was time to Paint it digitally so i startrd filling in base colors to the character Sea blue and lilac toh the body red to yhe hair Jewelry was Golden and her fins wre blue. After filling the base colors before i do the highlights and shading i wanted to make the background so we paint according to it.

For the Background i made a sea gradient with dark cobalt blue and aqua blue now i made some randome coral rocks in back with a stipple brush . i put a layer on top and shaded the coral . Now to make it more under water i made some Bubbles with brokeh effect and made some sea weed plants .

After this i started rendering the character for that i first shade the skin with an airbrush and a darker color then i shaded the white fins and tail .
same for the jewelry and gold accents too but Shading the hair is different i draw big hair strands in a darker volor and just guassian blur them.
Next i did the highlighys of her Hair with a pink color and by smudging it up down .

next i added highlights to her body since its a fish the scales and skin will be like slippery so the shine would be more i kept that in mind . i also added more highlights to the jewelry .

Lastly i changed Lineart color by doing protect alpha and coloring every element with a darker saturated color of the same element . I love coloring the lineart so it looks softer and more subtle . i colored the lineart and rendered her eyes last.

for the final piece i just Adjusted some lights and highlits to her eyeys colored her lips a bit and imported my watermark .

and here is the final Result . Comment down below what you think of this illustration . I love participating in this contest its always a great way to polish my digital drawing skills.

well that is all for today Thank you for you precious Time and support 🩷