Bravo! This turned out awesome!

Btw....how do you do backgrounds? I suck at it...

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Terribly annoying and incredibly boring.

Open for commissions or trades

Backgrounds? erm... I tend to twitch and spazz out...

haha no but seriously, I take my trusty pen tablet, right? then start selecting nifty/moody colors in background and foreground, usually something pearly for highlight, and something earthy/brownish for shadows. It's generally shades of orange. Then I make a new layer in "normal" blending, and work with linear gradients in it. First with the 2 colors I chose, then I change the opacity of the Gradient Tool itself to 80% and add different tones to this background. In this case I added some green and prune/purple shades to create an illusion of diversity.

THEN, on another layer, I take my Brush tool, hardness 100%, pen pressure on, opacity changing from 30 to 60% as I squiggle the landscape. You need a very good pen tablet for this, and preferably a powerful computer that always you to go nuts with long, fast strokes across a 2000 pixel wide canvas. It was impossible to do this on my old PC because it would slow down at each stroke. Pain in the ass.

So once you start squiggling you need to follow the general rules of speed painting, which means you basically never touch the Eraser, use the Eyedropper tool to change your painting color. Your landscape needs to blend in your gradient colors. It may look bland and very boring at first, but the secret of speed painting is never to stop. Here, unlike in traditional painting, the more you add, the better it gets.

For other elements like dust, sand and windy things you can play around with your brush, take a fuzzy huge tip, with scattering and size jitter on, I usually prefer Color Dodge for this kind of thing because I hate searching for the perfect color to use. So, Color Dodge is an excellent blending mode to improvise "3D" and cool light effects.

I hope this answers your question!

Sweet! thanks Dae!

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Terribly annoying and incredibly boring.

Open for commissions or trades

same background looks awesome, and with mando... just wow!

you showed this like it would be a frame from some movie XD

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the shortest way to man's heart is with knife through his chest

Kote!
Kandosii sa ka’rta, Vode an.
Coruscanta a’den mhi, Vode an.
Bal kote, darasuum kote, Jorso’ran kando a tome.
Sa kyr'am nau tracyn kad, Vode an.
"vode an"

Thanks I'm glad I took my time for this one!

Wow. Just wow. Amazing colors; the way you blurred everything out in the light is just awesome. I envy you the ability to make simple backgrounds look amazing.

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Real men wear kamas.

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Open for commission, maybe for art trades.

Wow! That is one truly beautiful piece of art!

Splendid lightning, excellent choice of colors, creates an amazing atmosphere! I love how the two are incorporated into the the background, with dust or sand kicked up by the wind in front of them.

Pretty impressive, I gotta say!

Btw, it's interesting to see that Verda has green gauntlets and knee-guards to a purple armor while Amyr has purple ones to a green armor. Looks like the two are really complementing each other.

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Rage of the Shadow Warriors - My Star Wars Fanfiction Saga
[link]

That complementary thing was kind of accidental since I've learned to use a limited palette.

I'm happy that you noticed the dust and grittiness of the setting! It's what required most work, I'm not really good at "weathering" armor anymore because drawing clean things is so much easier.

Thanks so much for this comment!

I cheat a lot! It's all about adding layers and layers of gradients and not being afraid to splotch a lot of fuzzy dots everywhere

Thanks!