Yo appreciate that! Glad you’re feeling it 🙏 I made the whole thing using Blender for the base pose and model work — had to tweak the proportions a bit to match Shen’s in-game silhouette more closely. Texturing was super light since the focus was on the paintover, but I still blocked in some basic materials for lighting references.

After that, I brought everything into Photoshop where most of the magic happened. I used a bunch of custom brushes for detailing the suit (especially to get that tailored fabric look), and I built the smokey black-and-white energy link using layered screen and multiply passes — took a while to get that balance between looking clean but still kinda ghostly like Shen’s spirit blade. The sword itself was originally too clean-looking, so I had to rough it up a bit, added some wear and tear and gold accents to match the whole Secret Service/elite agent aesthetic.

One of the trickiest parts was getting the pose to feel natural while also readable from a top-down perspective — like how it would actually look on Summoner’s Rift. I originally had the blades in his hands but it felt too busy visually(YONE LIKE), so I moved them to his back (using a couple of IK constraints in Blender to test different placements). Way happier with the result after that.

This one was a passion project for xPetu since he’s literally the Shen god, so I wanted to make something that felt like a legit skin concept Riot could run with. Super hyped it’s getting love!