Splinterlands art contest week #290 (Angelic Mandarin)

Here I'm again to Participate after 3 weeks in Splinterlands art contest . Before we go further here is a little introduction about the
whole Contest for the new people .

Every week splinterlands community holds an art contest on Hive.blog and all the participants have to draw one of there cards from Splinterlandscards.com in their own art style or something inspired by the card . Artists can use any medium for doing so the only rules are that you can participate only once per week and no copying other people's work , Plagiarism is strictly prohibited . So be original have fun .

This week for my entry I drew a special card because this might be the only card that is not that modified and actually is a real creature . For my entry I'm drawing the card Angelic Mandarin .
Mandarins are basically fishes that are just some of the most colorful fishes ever . So in the card the colors are pretty much same to the natural ones these beautiful fishes look like a frog in front and like colorful clown fishes just instead of white and orange these are Blue chrome transitioning into a green color and with orange stripes and the eyes are all black with the iris and pupils being bright yellow and orange in color . The card just had a halo of glowy light around the fish as it was flowing with it's fin like an angel .

Keeping that in mind I also saw some real Mandarin pictures too as reference noticed how the structure is of this fish and started drawing .

So for the sketch , I start with drawing the face and basic body of the fish with bulbous round eyes and jutted fish lips . My main focus were the tail and these flowy petal like Fins that had these ruffled , flowy feeling to them. Same for the tail and now I drew a dramatic eyeliner cause why not ? And then I added stripes and dots to the tails and fins each one of them and here our Sketch was all done .
Next I imported this sketch in a digital drawing app called Medibang paint pro. I imported the sketch and started drawing over it tracing a lineart of it with a Pen sharp brush . So first I traced the main body then I traces the pattern and stripes and after that I made her eyes and did the rest of the details so my basic Lineart is all done .

After the lineart was all ready I began coloring it all and for that I just used the selection tool and made the body parts all cobalt blue . The reason is I will clip layers on top of this base flat color layer and add gradient teal color to it . Next on another layer I selected the rest of the pattern and made it orange .

After that I selected the face and made it teal in color and filled the eyes with black too . So that's our flat colors for the first part .

After this the second part of coloring is rendering and the rendering I do is very simple . I just focus on where the light is hitting where the color will be lighter and darker . For this I changed the Background Color to a gradient seablue and teal . Then I just used my selection tool again and selected each part and clipped a layer over the flat color layer and used gradient fill tool to put teal gradient for each part I used a different angle and all . Same way I did the orange stripes selected the parts and just put a lil yellow gradient for the head I used a lighter teal and applied it on the bulbous eyes of our Mandarin and her head . I also detailed some more yellow spirals in her iris and eyes .

Lastly I put some yellow fragments with fragment brush over and under the mandarin and just made the layer blending mode at add and lowered it's opacity a little. In end I put my water mark and here is the final Result hope you liked it .

I drew for this challenge after almost a month because I was dealing with some issues but I'm definitely happy to be back .
That's all for today Thank you for your precious time and support ❤️