Typography Exploration: Aquatus in Shadows

Hey everyone, welcome back to my post. 😄
As usual, exploring and trying out new things always gets me excited. After making a piece with just one color How I Made a Splinterlands Poster Using Only Text, then playing around with gradients and word combinations Turning Letters into ASHEN CINDERGRIM, this time I wanted to try something different: playing with shadows.

The “victim” of my experiment this time is Aquatus, the Archon from the water element. If you happened to read my previous post The Backfire Trap: A Hard Lesson in Strategy, Aquatus once made me lose a battle in Splinterlands. So yeah, consider this a bit of “creative revenge”—I decided to recreate him using just one typeface.

As always, I started with a sketch. I kept the pose exactly the same as the one on the Splinterlands card. Using CorelDraw 2018, I went straight in with the envelope feature, which I’ve already used a bunch of times before.

For the face, I first tried combining three words arranged in lines. But the result looked way too neat for the eyebrow area. In the end, I stuck with the version on the left—it fit better. From there, I continued laying out the letters along the outline, adjusting their size so the flow matched the muscle details.

Next up was the spear. I built it out completely, tweaking the tip a little to make it look more fierce.

I also added the fin-shaped ear to match the pose. At this point, the eyes and mouth were still empty, but the shape of Aquatus was starting to come alive.

Once all the letters were in place, I switched the colors to blue with a black background. That instantly gave the whole piece more life, and Aquatus’ form really started to stand out.

The last part I worked on was the teeth and fin ear. For the teeth, I actually reused the word Splinterlands from my previous work on Gabolano Soldier (with a few tweaks, of course).

For the final colors, I kept it simple—just five basic colors for the spear and fin ear.

But here’s where the fun part kicked in: experimenting with shadows. I added a glowing effect to the spear tip to make it look like it was radiating light. The result? It looked way more alive.

The only catch was, when I exported it to bitmap, the yellow glow on the spear got a bit dimmed.

No big deal though—I played around with the tint, saturation, and temperature settings. Surprisingly, it gave me a cooler look, which fits perfectly with Aquatus’ ocean vibe.

So yeah, that’s my little exploration this time. Now I’m curious—which one do you think looks better: the warm glowing version or the cool oceanic one?

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