World Serpent - Final & Process & WALLPAPERS! (Patreon)

Hi Patrons,

Here is my Jörmungandr ...painting. I don't really enjoy calling anything a "piece" or a "painting." Piece is...pretentious. And I don't like to paint, but this is more paint than drawing.

Regardless this is my drawing for the Gallery Nucleus God of War 20th anniversary show. 20 years ago I was 6. I've only ever played the two most recent games with the norse mythology, but I hear the old ones are very fun. Lore is crazy... I think I watched my brother play one of the old ones where he's ascending Olympus and besting large foe..? The two new ones though are great. Like a semi open world story driven combat game is my cup of tea. And it looks great and there's this huge snake.

Santa Monica Studio requested that the drawing should somehow convey the scale, both environmentally and perhaps story-wise of the games. I was first saddened by this news because I feared this might mean I might have to draw a mountain (idk why..) they said to avoid the main characters as focus because they don't just want 30 artworks of Kratos. I thought it could be cool to draw Atreus' fursonas (him in wolf/bear form) but as I am a lover of dragons, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to draw Jörmungandr. Honestly it felt like a cop out because I draw this exact image like every other day but what can ya do. It fit the prompt perfectly and people seem to love it so job well done.

As for the process, as usual I sketched out a concept to be approved, and the final didn't stray terribly from this. They asked that the colors be more close to his actual colors (the colors of my sketch were just to differentiate shapes..) and that was that.

 Then, I also did a very small medium test. If you don't draw traditionally very often this is quite crucial.. I often don't know how two mediums are gonna react together.

I thought about doing graphite because I wanted something that could get a gradient for the shading on the snake, but then I realized I could just do ink and use a dry brush technique. Then I would be able to do way more detail and get blacker blacks and there'd be less reflection (but never zero).

I decided to use acrylic gouache for the color because its thin and gorg but can also be opaque. It also dries matte. I thought about colored pencils but it wouldn't mix well with ink or something like that on top. I considered using paint as the lineart instead of ink, but its hard to get the consistency flowy enough and I am not great with a brush these days.

I also learned with testing that my ink was activated by water! So the acrylic white I use for the background would sometimes smudge the ink, so in the final I had to mask off the background area when I added the shadows.

 This is a more final lineart that I would use to transfer the drawing to my canvas (illustration board). I printed it out and transferred it with transfer paper.

It would have been nice if I cleaned up the scales a bit more before transferring but we press on. After I transferred it, I did an orangey-red layer on top as a pseudo underpainting. I then painted the base colors of the serpent on top, making it so I could just barely see the sketch underneath.

 After that, I inked on top. I use iroshizuku ink with a dip pen, just any flexible fine point one.

 Then, unfortunately it was time to mask off the background where necessary and do the shadows. The masking was tortuous with all my little scale bumps but never back down from a challenge. I used washi tape and had no issue with peeling except one area I got too overzealous with, but it was ok.

After that was done, I had to paint the shadows! It was a delicate balance here to get the proper amount of ink on my brush. I find it best to use a very old tattered brush for this and have a little paper to test your dunk level on.

 I don't have a photo of it after, but once that was done I was all good to go to paint in the background. I do it last so that I can cover up any blemishes... I use a pure white acrylic mixed with a greenish yellowish white. I apply it haphazardly so it has a slight texture and the underpainting comes through.

For the gang in the middle, I just very loosely used ink to get some details in there, they're half an inch tall or so, so it was difficult but I did my best!

I painted Jörmungandr's eye yellow and called it a day...

That's all! wallpaper below!