Ranarh's Art Blog

 Some recent character designs I did for a group I run of deviantArt. I was surprised that people apparently liked the tiny back story to this piece: The neighbourhood witch is the creepy old lady living at the end of the road. Nobody ever sees her do the groceries or mow her lawn, and there are plenty of balls in her front yard because nobody dares get them back. And maybe there really is something true about the rumours that every time someone gets lost or a murder is committed, she has a new cat afterwards...

I started this early in January when I fiddled with Painter 12's mirror feature to create a portrait and then added some fractals and lizards for interest. There are about five hours of work in this; I meant it to be only a speedpainting but now find that I may have taken it a little beyond that.

I decide against my sloppy handwritten names and get a nice free font from dafont.com to type everything (of course handwritten text is much nicer, but takes a lot more time). I use no more than three font sizes and rotate the names when needed, but keep them straight; curved text will be reserved for landmarks. If a name really doesn't fit, I put it outside, either overlapping the border when there is a lot of room, or connect the name and land with a line. This requires a little shuffling to make sure everything is readable. I now have three maps on poster format. The prices for having these printed are murder, so I divide them into nine pieces each, add the topology as grayscale, print them at home and tape them together, then hang them up the wall. From now on every time I pass my maps, I will add a little something; a mountain here, a capital there. I have often found that taking my time will give better results, and I expect this step of naming everything to take just u...

The Light tutorial series by Richard Yot has proven invaluable to me. Richard explains natural light and artificial light, lighting conditions and how they can be used to effect in art. He clears up thinking mistakes in stereotypical lighting, and uses wonderful pictures for examples. Everything is easy to understand. I strongly suggest to read this tutorial, and then go paint som wonderful light!

Speedpainting based on an Al.chemy scribble. I played a bit with the channels after flipping through Exodyssey by Steambot Studios, and I like some of the effects that it produced. Also, handpaint is better for birds; I often use custom brushes, but they need tweaking anyway, so I guess I can just scribble them myself from the start...

Now for some colours. Right now I want a topological map showing the heights of the land. Green is for sealevel heights; the colours go from brighter green to yellows, ochre, browns, and the highest mountains will become grey, then white. This is standard, anyway; you might want to try other colours. I keep the outlines on a separate layer set to Multiply and lay down flat colours. I keep the landmass as a selection made from the outside of the linework, and the water on top. I roughly blend the colours with low-opacity brushstrokes, and then put several textures (rust-stained paper, acrylics paint strokes) over them to provide details. I use them on low opacity as Overlay and Soft Light layers. After that, on a new layer I brush in shadows on the lower right sides of the mountains, and use some of the texture details to put in even more mountains. I fix up the rivers with the lasso tool and add some more. I could of course texture the water as well but find it too distracting for no...

I created a new blog for my fantasy setting Genius Loci at starmakersgaze.blogspot.com Along the paintings, you can find a lot of descriptions there (its not just a visual development, there is actually quite a lot of writing involved in coming up with a world) and, hopefully soon, some of the sketches I do. this blog right here will of course stay online. The fact remains that I wouldn't know where else to put spaceships.