Heroes' Tale: Venomous Crawler

Here's my first reveal of a card illustration for a role-playing trading card game called "Heroes' Tale", a project by Merlino Entertainment that I'm happy to be a part of, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter!

Creature Lore:

"Feast upon their flesh..." - Swarm Commander

The Venomous Crawler is a very effective unit in Ulek's army. It is covered with an assortment of spines and claws with venom that can paralyze its foes. The Venomous Crawler is not as large as its bigger brother, the Hive Warrior, so it relies on grouping up with larger units or swarming with others to bring down its next meal. One of its favourite tactics is to find resting travelers where it can quietly sneak in and paralyze them, leaving them to eat at leisure.

The Upbeast Plushie

Turned The Upbeast into a 7-inch tall, chibi plush. :'D

Not sure if I wanted to sew the snake onto the wolf's body, so I kept them separate for now. The snake naturally coils like that in the pics but can't be posed (probably should've put a wire in him...).

Definitely had to simplify the original concept. Sewing the tattoo markings on both the wolf and the snake was challenging.

Stylish Art Dump

Been painting random pieces lately but haven't posted them on this website yet.

"You gonna help him?"

Another KP sketch, this time featuring BEE. (inside joke-ish, I think? But it's a Twitter thing and there's this bee Knife Party has around that gets wasted all the time)

I LOVE Tron Uprising. I've watched it twice and probably going to keep re-watching it until I get sick of it - which won't happen. Everything about the art direction, story, and characters I love - I'm just very sad that the show was never finished. :( I really wanted to paint a piece of fan art for it, so here's Ryan from my MOTH story if he existed in the Tron universe.

Silence's "Black Magic"

     - Another one of the EDM Arena realistic paintings.

     - Colour was explored in this one. The painting's overall colour scheme comes from Kill the Noise's album "Black Magic".

Watercolour Lazer Fire

I started a new series of paintings focusing on realism and effects:

Top: Lord Pendulum's "Watercolour"
     - Main focuses here were painting specular on the eye and helmet and most importantly, the water splashes. I'd never painted water in motion before, so this one was a challenge at first.
     - Upon finishing the piece, painting the shape of the moving water was the most fun - getting it to look transparent but still reflective was tricky (had to mess with several layer styles to get it right). Also, the water's transparency turned out best when I made it grayscale, not a blue tint.

Middle and bottom: KP's "Lazer Fire"
     - Painting KP in realism was super simple, so I focused on trying to nail the effects on these two: lasers, fog, and fire.
     - Challenges I came across for these two: getting the fog to look transparent but overlay the laser lights (again, playing around with multiple layer styles), and painting fire. Like Lord Pendulum's water, [R]KP's fire was tricky, as it's very organic and hard to capture a constantly moving entity. The fire is comprised of two painted fire layers, then layer styles on top of that.

Hope to tackle some more characters and special effects.