Fiery Serpent [Steem Monsters Digital Art]

Continuing on my painting streak started last week with Mischievous Mermaid, I’ve been working on something based off another Steem Monsters card for their week 3 art contest. Because I did one for the blue/water Splinter, I decided to go with red/fire Splinter this time.

Of the elements in general, I’m attached to fire the most. As someone who utterly detests heat of any kind, this is particularly strange but there’s something about fire that just appeals to me. The raw power of its nature, the fact that it’s a plasma and thus superheated particles, the various forms it takes like magma and lightning, and the way it rolls and dances as it feeds on oxygen.

It would be easier to just say it’s the sentiment people have associated with fire like the symbolic attributes it holds across many cultures, but that would be untrue. I’m not a sentimental person. What captivates me about fire is the physics of it. I could get lost staring at it and thinking of—to the best of my knowledge—how it exists, what it’s composed of, and all the wonders of science it entails to make it be.

As such, painting this was an utter pleasure. I prefer to keep the “form” of the flames fluid and vague. To me, that makes more sense for the element’s nature. Does it justice. It captures its beauty instead of focusing on its danger.

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The original Steem Monsters card: Serpent of the Flame.

The Making Of

I’ve been intending to re-do one of my old digital paintings, Boomslang (pronounced as boo-um-slung—Afrikaans for “tree snake”, which is a green mamba), and took this opportunity to do so after several years. Converting my Boomslang painting, I redrew the line-art in Krita for the basic pose which I still really like, and started from scratch from there to make the Serpent of the Flame. I used the pen tool with a 5px round brush to draw the line-art.

As I’m wont to do, I laid down the basic colours of the subjects and created a swatch layer to reference from. Like I did with Mischievous Mermaid, I kept the parts in separate layers for easier working. My method for this is to fill the section divided by the line-art with the colour intended using the paint bucket tool on the different layers. With Krita, you can use the paint bucket tool and it won’t fill the entire layer. Love that feature. After I’ve blocked in the colours, I cleaned up each layer’s edges using a round brush so that it’s smooth.

Hiding the tree paint layer, I added new layers above the serpent’s parts and drew in segment lines with the pen tool. When I was satisfied with how the segments looked, I painted in shadows and highlights (both on their own layers as well) using the sponge brush for the rough texture it gives. The texture of the brush also makes blending smoother. For the blending, I used the standard blender brush tool set to 80% opacity.

For the shadows and highlights I used two shades from the lightest going darker to make blending easier. When the shadows and highlights were blended, I grabbed the rubber eraser tool and cleaned up along the segment lines for the sharp contrast. The same process was repeated for the tongue, teeth, scales, and the eye.

The serpent took form quickly after that when I added more layers for some extra shadows to create depth. For this I used the airbrush tool set to 100% opacity, which I set to Multiply in the layer style and lowered the layer’s opacity. And because I was seeing some lag at this point, I had to merge the shadows and highlights layers to the base colour layers along with the segment line-art which I made a deeper shade of the base color.

For the flames, I blotted in a dark orange, light orange, and yellow using the sponge tool. This I blended together—roughly—using the blender brush tool. At that point, the fire didn’t have quite enough definition. To remedy this, I duplicated each fire three times. The first duplicate of the fires was set to overlay at 100% opacity. The second was set to Soft Light at 100% opacity, and the third to Multiply at 25% opacity.

The duplicates gave a bit more definition but not yet enough.

Scrolling through the custom preset brushes that come standard in Krita, I played around with several layers and brushes of a cloud, smoke, and mountain texture with the three colours of the fires until I had some crisp definition. These layers I merged then blurred to about 30px with the Guassian Blur filter to remove some of the definition.

When I was content with the fires’ texture, I worked the above steps for the tree, adding in some texture to the bark using the water texture brush in Krita’s preset brushes. Using the soft eraser brush on 50% opacity, I cleaned up the tree’s texture to make it appear as separate to each twisting branch.

Then it was time for the finishing touches.

With a soft airbrush on a new layer which I set to Soft Light, I grabbed the brightest yellow colour from the fires and painted in along the highlights of both the serpent and tree. Always keeping the light sources of the fires in mind. Under the new highlight layers I just did, I grabbed black and airbrushed the shadows that would be cast according to the light sources and set the layers to Multiply and 65% opacity.

With the subjects complete, it was time to make the background. Using the sponge tool, I blotted in dark, medium, and light grey according to the texture of the background on the original Boomslang painting. This I blended with the blender brush tool. On a new layer above that, I filled the canvas with a maroon colour and set the layer to Multiply at 95% opacity. Again on a new layer with the sponge tool, I blotted in yellow around the center under each fire, followed by light orange, then dark orange outside that. This I blended with the bender tool and used Guassian Blur filter at 90px three times to smooth it out more, and set the layer to Lighten with 75% opacity.

As the last step to the completed painting at the top, I added in more shadows and highlights as needed to get the lighting right according to the light sources. The finished work resulted in a drastic difference from the original Boomslang painting I did years ago.

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