Animated Hero Of The Beyond - Splinterlands Art Contest Week 302!

This is probably the hardest Splinterlands Fan Art I have made for the weekly challenge. I tried to make a better animation by making multiple different frames instead of just adding effects.

The character I decided to draw this week is the Life Element Epic Unit, Hero of the Beyond.

My Entry

Applications used: Medibang, Adobe Photoshop, Capcut Desktop & MP4 to GIF Converter.

Reference Image:

Image Source: Splintercards.com

First, I sketched the pose of Hero of the Beyond that I visualized. It started with a rough sketch, then I gradually built up the image and slowly added a costume similar to the one in the Splinterlands lore for the chosen character.

After that, I added the main colors, organized them in a folder, and named it base colors to keep things tidy.

Once I indicated the colors, I duplicated the base colors folder and renamed it shade colors. In this duplicated folder, I added shading and highlights to the colors of my chosen hero. I used a combination of airbrush, watercolor brush, and charcoal brush for the shading.

After I finished adding the shading, I duplicated the shade colors folder again and renamed it blend folder. Here, I blurred the overlay colors I had added as shades. I needed to blend them to make the colors smooth.

BASE	SHADED	BLENDED

My art doesn't stop there. I exported the gold colors of the character as Gold base and Gold Shade, planning to add a glow effect. The blended layers in the blend folder were merged. Once everything was merged, I duplicated the layer 10 times because I planned to make an animation.

For each file, I adjusted the cape, hair highlights, and eyes to make them different. This is what I would animate as frames. Normal animation uses 24 frames per second, but since I'm a newbie and doing this for the first time, I tried 10 frames first.

After adjusting the 10 layers of artwork, I exported them AS .PNG file one by one and named them Animation 1 - 10.

I opened Photoshop and created a gradient background with a long length because I wanted it to scroll, and as it scrolls, it would look like the background color of the animation is changing. I also made a green screen background because I knew I would encounter animation problems later.

I then opened the Capcut application and loaded the 10 different images of our hero and other materials I would use.

Since my computer is slow and runs out of memory, I first made a green screen MP4 of the 10 images. I did this to prevent my laptop from hanging. I just lined them up in the timeline and placed he green color image that i have created at the bottom layer. i also added a glow to the hero's golden armor.

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I created a new file again, and this time, I placed the background at the bottom layer, added keyframes so the image would move down, making it look like the color is changing. After this, I overlaid the green screen of the animated hero. I added a rebound swing effect to give it movement, added a lightning eyes effect to make the eyes glow, and put a lightning effect underneath the green screen for drama.

In the middle part, I decided to add additional effects like highlight energy and explosion, and other effects for more drama in my animation. I timed this with the yellow background and removed the lightning effect at this time.
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I duplicated the layer and reversed the flow of the background to make it dark again, and at the end, I added the lightning effect again. I did this to make the animation loop and not cut off abruptly.

I hope you liked my fan art. If you have any tips and tricks to improve my art, don't hesitate to comment below. Thanks!