About the Illustration - Earth Warden

This piece took me over 70 hours to complete, and took me a few iterations to get to this point as well. So far, it’s easily my most work-intensive pieces. But it was so worth it! Even though it was tiring, it was so rewarding to finally complete this illustration.

The story for this piece is as follows — nearby villagers made fresh flower offerings to a statue representing a long-absent guardian, in hopes that it would be summoned and help restore the forest surrounding them to health. This worked, the Earth Warden was summoned, and new plant life began flourishing around it. This is supposed to be a sacred area within this forest, which I wanted to indicate through the various decorations throughout this piece.

The bright green plant life close to the creature in this piece represents new life growing, as do the lily pads and newly-sprouted water lily buds by its tail! I loved painting in the different plant types and shapes here.

Another part of the illustration I enjoyed painting was the yellow light surrounding the statue and the Earth Warden itself -- I wanted it to tie the two together.

One of the more challenging areas of illustrating this piece was painting each plate along its back. I was having trouble making them all uniform, especially with all of the twists and turns in the tail itself.

I loved painting the colors in this piece, as green is my favorite color, I got to paint so many different hues of green here!

If you have an idea in your head, don’t be afraid to try it, and give it as many tries as it takes to get it to a point where it represents and looks like what you want it to! So many times I would be so hard on myself if my first attempt didn’t turn out how I wanted it to, but this isn’t realistic or fair to yourself. You’d be surprised how many failed attempts there are on the way to creating the pieces you want to make.