Antlion

I've been itching to submit something for the latest ArtOrder Challenge for a while now*. Being that the theme of this challenge is "inspiration" it seemed like it offered a great opportunity for me to crank out some fan art. I spent a lot of time considering what I wanted to paint for this, and after a while I realized that I had never done any Final Fantasy IX art, FFIX being one of my all time favorite games. This also gave me the perfect chance to do a nice monster-illustration for Jon Schindehette (something he requested I do for him during my review with him at Illuxcon). So I thought, why not kill two birds with one painting and have some fun while I'm at it.

My Antlion

After sifting through all of the monsters in FFIX I picked one of my favorites, the Antlion. This creature is a common enemy in the game, but the way it is first introduced really made an impact on me when I first played the game years and years ago. When you climb to the top of this massive, hollowed out tree in the desert, you'll reach a settlement in the sky called Cleyra. There is a fork in the road, one path leads up into the town, and the other leads to an ominous sandy pit with not much else around...hmm interesting. Later a significant character is attached by the pit's inhabitant, the Antlion.

In-game graphics fighting the Antlion - FFIX

I love the design to this guy as well as his colors and I thought the setting would be fun to paint him in as well (I'm trying to steer away from monsters just chilling on a plain white background), so I decided to give him a go and I'm really happy with the results! I'm excited to enter the latest challenge and I'm hoping to have some more time to come up with another piece before the due date.

Not a real Magic card, created for promotional purposes only

Oh yeah, I also decided to make a Magic: the Gathering Antlion card using my illustration, I hope you get a kick out of it. I'm going to make another post on how I painted this piece using what I've learned from my recent critiques so stay tuned for that!

*Note: After reading over the competition guidelines again I realized that my entry is unacceptable due the creature being owned by SquareEnix. Oops.