Celure vs Sahamel

SPOILER ALERT! Look away before you ruin the experience! Your eyes will melt and your pants will catch on fire!! ....... Oh well, I tried.

I got it done! Ha HA, you nasty picture, how you like THEM apples??? Ohhh it has been a long and difficult battle to get this image completed. I'll probably come back and touch it up when I have more time tomorrow, but for now it's getting put up for your viewing pleasure. I needed a victory tonight.

This is a scene from Taloner: Reima, one of the short stories I have written and self-published (shameless promotion! Yay!) I really, really enjoyed writing this scene, which is a magic-heavy duel between a priestess and a sorceress, and ever since writing that book I've had this image in my head. I would love to use it as some kind of cover image if I ever release a special edition of some of the Taloner books. (Yep, there will be more of them.....I told you this was rife with spoilers)

So I had a lot of stuff on this that wanted to fight me from the get-go. First off, I don't know how many times I've had to rehash the positioning of the figures here. I also couldn't tell you how much time was spent working with that fire dragon to get it into a shape/spot that I felt was at least workable, and not an eyesore (I really hope it isn't still an eyesore) Another thing I had a problem with was that I am still learning how to draw humans well enough that I don't make a laughing stock of my art. That elf's face was incredibly challenging for me to get right, but I think this is the best result that the (far too many) hours have yielded, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I used my method of erasing out portions of a solid black layer on this to get most of the shadows. I wanted it to have a more dramatic look with the dark against the colors, and I love this method because it's like forcing your brain to work in reverse when coloring.

For example - When not using the blackdrop layer method for shadows, I begin the coloring stage by putting down chunks of a medium-toned flat color. After this I proceed to go in and color darker or lighter portions along that flat color in order to give the original tone some variation. With the blackdrop layer approach, I do the flat colors, then the highlights or lighter tones, then drop the black over everything and go in to erase the spots I don't want to be so shadowed, such as the highlighted portions and a little of the original flat color. I hope you understand what I just said. It makes sense in my head, at least. Sigh........