Steem Monsters Digital Art: Lightning Dragon Unleashed

Howdy folks!

Sorry, no secret Steem Monsters sauce here. Maybe next time (if I'm allowed to share it).

Meanwhile, I figured I would share artwork just for fun.

I don't get much time to dabble artistically. I'm not sure I have the mentality to go full "artist" on anything. After all, art is often associated with a "when it's done, it's done" philosophy. Which is in stark contrast with the professional world I live in, full of deadlines and deliverables.

It would be nice to lovingly sculpt every shadow and refine every highlight to the point of absolute perfection. But who has the time, right?

I'm sure I could have spent a week on this piece, tweaking and polishing to the microscopic level. But at the end of the day, I feel pretty good about it. It was fun. It was relaxing. I fulfilled what I set out to do: conceptualize just one out of a ba-jillion different artistic styles for future Steem Monsters graphic elements.

Okay, so let's get down to it!

I've got a Surface Pro, which is pretty cool. The touch sensitive screen. The nifty stylus. I've made use of these things when working with Illustrator or Photoshop. However, something has to be said for the fluid and intuitive feel of the Apple pencil on the iPad.

For those who aren't already familiar with the absolutely beautiful drawing app, Procreate...well, it's pretty awesome. If you like creating digital art, go install Procreate on your iPad. The interface is well thought out and easy to use.

I decided that I would re-imagine Steem Monster's Lightning Dragon with a dose of hyper-realism. Nothing too crazy. Just enough to produce a frame of reference. A comparison of sorts.

As such, I didn't really need the entire body. The head would be enough.

So let's take a look at the original card art:

Honestly, it already looks cool to begin with. But if we stop here, I can't really justify this blog post. So...guess we should keep going.

I'm tempted to change the perspective. A full body side view is rather passive for my taste. Let's get dramatic. It's a DRAGON! I want the viewer to piss themselves in terror. I want them to wake up crying in the middle of the night. I want them to subconsciously shy away from lizards at the pet store.

But let's not go nutty.

The full-blown eye of the dragon stare-down can wait. Right now, we need to stick with the lines of the original artwork as closely as possible. There's a lot of cool elements to work with here.

Unfortunately, the fun doesn't come until later. We need to start with the flats.

For stuff like this, layer management is crucial. Each part of the body is organized on a different layer. It's important to label each layer because you might end up with a LOT of layers. So each time you create a new layer, make sure you name it accordingly. For instance, I have a layer named "Upper Body Base". Another layer might be named "Upper Body Shadows" or "Upper Body Highlights". So on and so forth.

This is good practice for many reasons. Procreate allows you to export as a PSD (Photoshop) file. You'll definitely want to have names associated with all those layers if you continue working in another program. From Photoshop, you might end up dropping your creation into After Effects (or similar program) for animation or multimedia. Again, you'll be thankful that all the layers have names.

Welp, I'm not gonna bore you with every little step of the process, so let's skip ahead to the end:

Yay! Scary dragon that can power all your mobile devices!

Here's my master plan: In between all my crazy work, I'm going to TRY to re-design existing monsters using different artistic styles. It'll be fun and hopefully help to facilitate discussions on what makes sense for when things really blow up in the future. As I unleash more of these examples, please continue to provide feedback on what you guys think is cool and what types of style samples you'd like to see next!