Ranarh's Art Blog

My art recently caught the attention of friendly writer Adrien Scott:, who just did an interview with me for Squidoo. We talk about inspiration, motivation, and advice with a feature of some of my artworks. You can read it here: http://www.squidoo.com/art-features-jennifer-s-lange

I created these two resource packages, "11 patterned pen brushes for Corel Painter", and "5 stellar nebulae backgrounds". You can download them on my deviantArt account ranarh.deviantart.com , both are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, so you can use them anywhere you don't make money with. Have fun with them!

To make certain that a pattern has correct perspective, you will have to paint it by hand. But here are some techniques to make your life easier if perspective doesn't matter so much. Using Brushes as patterns I arrange the brush settings like this: I then use the Pinch and Bulge brushes from F-X carefully to match the perspective. Advantages: by adjusting the spacing or colours (or Color Variability > From Gradient) you can make many different versions of the pattern. You can use any brush type you are comfortable with. Using patterns as... well, patterns You can capture anything as a pattern in the Pattern Panel. Patterns can be used with the Fill Bucket , Pattern Pens , and as Clone Source , making them quite versatile. Capture patterns intended for lace and such as masked patterns to preserve transparency. Painter handles making seamless tiles nicely under check out pattern . Advantages: the Fill Bucket's great for fabric patterns or buildings....

Bonus information for Tiny Tip #20 Download (ranarh.deviantart.com) My twentieth tutorial from the "Ranarh's tiny tips" series. You can find the other tutorials at my deviant Art account . - The lens sticks out of the eyeball. That's why it so often catches highlights - they do not necessarily appear inside the pupil. When painting mirrored reflections, keep in mind only lit parts are reflected. Reflections can make the pupil appear less than round from afar. - The eyeball is reddish at the inner corner. Some phenotypes have a yellowish eyeball, especially very dark black skinned people. - Eyelashes with heavy black makeup are easier to paint, but I urge you to learn to paint them without first. Lashes are about as long as the eyeball in profile - often men's are longer - and stick out in irregular rows. Don't zoom in too much, that minimizes the risk of too short lashes. Under harsh light, lashes cast a long shadow, especially at the outer corner. ...

Gigantic monsters aren't my usual, but the open mouth of a ship-eating leviathan popped into my head with chilling clarity. Or so I thought before I put the stylus to the tablet ;) I sketched some thumbnails in Painter to compare view points. As usual, I chose the composition of one and the lighting of another and went to work with colour.   For colour blocking, I use the largest brush possible and set it to colour jitter. I chose a colour scheme of almost complementary fleshy pink and sea blue, and fixed the position of some tentacles so that they are better balanced throughout the picture. I centralized the mouth and used several ragged brushes and spattery airbrushes in Painter. References were used for the ship and waves. I finally moved the thing into Photoshop, and used Images>Adjustments>Variations to further enhance the atmospheric effect.

Arborie is a character I was commissioned to paint. Here are a few working steps. Thumbnails I scribble some rough poses for the client. We agree on a lying pose; the character is fashionable and confident, and a harper and swordfighter. The character is from a Dungeons&Dragons setting, but I decide to create my own take and not rely on the official artwork. Refined sketch and colours I create a refined sketch based on reference pictures - photos of myself for the character, various flowers, the harp (tricky perspective), and plenty more pictures for inspiration like for the sword hilt or jewelry. Via email, the client and I agree on warm autumn colours. I also want some interesting lighting and decide to create dappled light falling through the leaves overhead; this will require careful handling of the colour of lights and shadows because the light spots will be very bright and saturated, but the overall colours are supposed to be warm as well. I used Painter so far. ...

Some designs for spacesuits for an rpg campaign we are playing. We have this very old but perky ship, and of course wear boardsuits so that we don't all die when there's a hull breach. The GM liked the spacesuit I designed for the spacepilot from my recent blog entry, but I came up with some more advanced-looking, skintight designs anyway. Simple grayscale sketches over silhouettes. I really like working symmetrically, it saves a lot of time ;)