Here's a sneak peek of content that's normally not for the general public! For every illustration I made for Netherrealms, I did a write-up of how I made the piece and release that exclusively for ρatrons.
This is an illustration I’ve been looking forward to painting again with my skill having progressed after 5 years. Here’s the first version I painted back in 2016:
This was my starting point when I started figuring out a way to remake this illustration. I didn’t want to change the composition, but I did want to add a lot of things I learned about lighting, costume design and giving direction to the composition.
As usual, I started with a moodboard to gather reference for lighting, the costume etc.
I then started setting up a scene to create reference for for Than’s pose. I loved the pose in one of the reference images (the mannequin in Cersei’s dress at the top left of the ref board, for the experts) so I decided to emulate that, with some adaptations to have Than look down at us all (as she does).
Eventually, I had a scene set up, but no real idea how I was going to approach the new version of her dress. For a quick mock-up, I just made a screenshot from Blender of the scene I already had and sketched on top of that in Photoshop:
Now that I’ve got the basic shapes down, I have a little fun and recreate the dress in Marvelous Designer. I took the dress I made in Marvelous for Nergui earlier as a base and adapted that to fit Than’s frame, and looked up some really basic puffy sleeves patterns to emulate those, plus her overcoat.
(I actually understand sewing so much better after making a few of these - not that I’d actually be able to sew a dress after this though)
Since her collar would be a hard surface thing, I modeled that in Blender, imported the cloth from Marvelous and voilá, we have some reference:
Her collar didn’t have the shape I wanted exactly and the fabric of her overcoat wasn’t as thick as I wanted it to be, but this gives me a good idea of where I want to take the piece. So now I could go on to the actual drawing!
After the initial sketch I begin to lay in some colors, and make selections to fill them with the gradient tool. After a while, the painting looks like this:
I decided at this point I hadn’t taken Native’s anatomy into account enough: their necks are very elongated and their shoulders rest really low. I ended up adapting my sketch with the liquify tool to emphasise that a bit more, though I realized the collar would cover up a lot of that effect.
What I’ve also done at this point is create a design for the overcoat. To keep it consistent, I used the symmetry tool with different shapes to create designs, and clipped those to the blue square I’d created. I then made a smart object out of that whole design. That way, I could duplicate it, use it on the other side of her overcoat, and then change the design without having to redo it twice.
I used the same technique on the ribbons hanging from her collar as the rest of the patterned fabric: I created a design within a smart object, and then duplicated that smart object to fit other spaces where I wanted them to fit. I also decided at this point (after looking up some extra reference) that the gold embossing wasn’t looking like it should, so I made it a lot darker.
When I was almost finished I realized that the image was incredibly dark (in a bad way), so I upped the contrast a bit in the whole image, but also brightened up Than a bit to bring her more to the foreground.
I like to let a piece rest for a while after I’ve worked on it. Sometimes I even come back to a piece after a week with new insights. This one went through the same process. After a week of vacation I came back to the piece and made some final color adjustments and brightened everything up a bit more. And that’s how I ended up with the final piece!
I’m happy to have tackled this piece, because I now have a worthy piece to display next to Time. Now I only need a version of Tallulah where she doesn’t have her head in the clouds and I’ll have the full triptych. :)
If you found that interesting, I have about 19 more articles like this on my patreon, for just $2 a month! And with pledging, you help me create more Netherrealms to boot :)
