Turning Letters into ASHEN CINDERGRIM

Hello everyone, welcome back to my post. After trying out some letter-based artwork before, this time I decided to give it another shot—this time with one of the characters from Splinterlands, designed in a typography style. If you’ve seen my previous post here: How I Made a Splinterlands Poster Using Only Text, I created that piece in Corel Draw.

Now, it’s Ashen Cindergrim’s turn—the bearded fire-element wizard.

Honestly, this character was quite a challenge. Especially when it came to his beard—the twisted, wavy shape made it pretty tricky to transform into letter arrangements. And then there’s the fire shield—it looks simple at first, but once I started working on it, it turned out to be more complicated than expected.

As usual, I started with a rough sketch, keeping the pose similar to the original card. The difference is, in my previous work I only used the word Splinterlands, but this time I explored further by also using the character’s name directly.

For the beard, I used both Splinterlands and Ashen Cindergrim, shaping the letters to follow the beard’s flow with the envelope effect in Corel Draw.

At first, I struggled with whether to make the words vertical or add extra lines, but it made the text harder to read. In the end, I split the word Cinder and placed the rest of it below.

After finishing the beard, I moved on to the robe. Here, I didn’t just stick to those two words—I added more Splinterlands-related terms, along with words I felt represented Ashen himself.

It became kind of like a word puzzle, which made the design feel more connected to the character.

The shield was another fun part. I used guide lines to build the swirl effect, then adjusted each letter node to create a spiral. It took quite a bit of time, but the result added some nice detail.

After that, I worked on the face, wizard hat, and finally the staff.

Now, about the colors—at first, I went with plain red against a black background. But the beard ended up looking too faint.

So I tried adding gradients, and it instantly came to life! The beard stood out more clearly, and it created a fiery effect that matched Ashen Cindergrim perfectly.

After a few hours of work, I finally wrapped it up. The final artwork is already adjusted to a standard wallpaper size—1923 x 1083 with a 16:9 ratio—so it’s ready to set on my laptop without stretching like the previous one.

That’s it for this piece. It was so much fun exploring typography again with a Splinterlands character. See you in the next artwork—who knows, maybe I’ll take on another character next time.

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