So Why Suramar?
Most paintings start with an idea or something that’s just caught my eye. Legion was my favourite expansion so far in World of Warcraft, with Suramar being my favourite city. This led me to taking a screenshot of the Nighthold and creating this painting from it.
The original screenshot.
Here you can see the screenshot that was taken in-game. You can see many features here that I didn’t include in the finished piece, such as my playable avatar and so much of the background. I realise now that I could have included the background more, but I didn’t want to take the attention away from the Doomed Tree or that amazing sunset. I also shifted the positioning of the Nighthold over to the left to feature more of the incredible Elven architecture.
The halfway point.
When I was painting this piece, it felt tricky not to get carried away with the detail on the Nighthold - it generally took more time to paint in the detail of the architecture than it did anything else. This picture shows the painting before I got too carried away with architecture - it was also the first time I had ever painted clouds and I was pretty proud of myself for nailing the fluffiness of them.
Overall, I felt this piece taught me a lot.
I’d never painted architecture like this before, and I wanted to challenge myself. It was also the first time I had ever painted a rainbow skybox like this, and I was really happy with the way it turned out. Like I already stated, the background could have been worked on a little more, and should I have completed this painting on a bigger scale (the original is 25x25cm) I would have done so. But with what I did learn, I took forward onto other pieces and felt accomplished that a painting could teach a painter so much.