League of Legends Preseason Three Digi-Art Contest

(Originally posted on Feb 9th 2013)

  I decided to practice my digital art by entering a contest that is being held at the moment, the League of Legends Digi-Art Throwdown.

Digi Art Throwdown page.

  The contest stated that the picture must include at least one character and one new object from the game, I decided on the icy bird called Anivia and a staff called Seraphs Embrace.

  First I set about drawing a sketch of what the pose of the bird would be.

Then I cleaned up the drawing by adding a second layer and tracing my sketch to get what is called a lineart.

I then decided to change the composition to a landscape one and added some basic colours and a rough background, I also changed the colour of the lineart

 I then created another layer, one which I like to call the “overpaint” layer, on this layer I added extra detail to refine the picture. I also created a layer which I called the “glow” layer, on this layer I used a colour dodge brush to create the glowing of the staff and the reflections on the crystals. I added some snow on a separate layer using a round brush with a motion blur filter and the warp transform tool. Some more fog was added to give more atmosphere.

I finally used adjustment layers to change the hue, saturation and levels of the picture until I was pleased with the result.

A higher quality version of the image can be found here.