The latest chapter of Loyalty Fallen is live! In this chapter, Kathryn, Ren, and Brenin make their escape from the castle.

Also I wanted to share the promotional art I created for Loyalty Fallen’s initial release. In the image, Kathryn has a violent outburst of verdant magic. This moment hasn’t occured in the story yet, but I’m very pleased with how the art turned out! You can see the work in progress below:

While normally I would add lighting and effects as the final step of the image, here I added them first on a separate layer and simply made that layer invisible while drawing the rest of the image. I wanted the focus of the whole image to be the verdant opal magic effects.

I always sketch out my digital art projects in red “ink” first. This is so that I can draw over it in the next step to make clean line art on a separate layer, which you can see below.

Sometimes I end up liking certain things about the work in progress more than the final image. For example, in the picture above, the “wings” around her eyes are more clearly visible, whereas they’re partially blocked by her hair in the final image. In addition, the darkness at the base of the image makes the verdant magic “vines” much more visible than they ended up being in the final image.

Still, I ended up being pretty satisfied with how the glowing effects and emotions were displayed in the final image. Plus, with the verdant magic glowing that brightly, the surroundings simply couldn’t be as dark as they were shown in the work in progress, so the lighting ended up being more accurate in the final image.

Head to my gallery page to see more of the art for Loyalty Fallen.

If you’re new to Loyalty Fallen, here’s the story:

“Princess Kathryn is determined to protect her country and her sister by marrying the former enemy of her kingdom, the second prince of Navinor. However, her life is threatened when her new husband is murdered, and she is accused of his death.”

Read the first chapters here and subscribe to get updated when a new chapter goes live each Tuesday.