Ranarh's Art Blog

Last year I was hired to create fifty illustrations including the cover for a puzzle book. The format was unusual because it was going to be triangular, like a mountain, because the overarching story between the riddles was a tribe of dwarves trapped by the magical queen (a bearded lady with a golden hat). Sadly, the book wasn't made, but I am still proud of the works I created for it. My first drawing to get the job of a dwarf. You can see my dwarves aren't actually very small. I enjoyed giving him some biker accents, because I imagine dwarves to be a lot like truckers and construction workers.    The design is still recognisable in the main protagonist Günther, who is younger and cleaner than this guy. When we discussed the style of illustration for the book, I came up with a few options. Everyone loved the idea of fully coloured acrylic illustrations; since it was to be the publisher's first book, we decided to go with black and white traditional ink in the end, with col

While I didn't manage nearly as many daily (or should it be often?) environment sketches as the previous year, I still made some. Here are a few of my favourites. Working in bulk is beneficial in several ways; it makes one feel less unproductive when they are piling up, one can get short ideas out quickly, and on the improvement side, doing many of a kind both trains doing it well, and shows up weaknesses. Later I repainted several of them in acrylics to get the hang of landscapes better, because it seems I do more landscapes digitally and more portraits traditionally. Almost all in different formats because I had precut papers I wanted to use up. If you're intereted, some are available in my Etsy shop .   "Why are they calling it Fish Falls if the fish don't fall? They jump." - "Jumping is upside-down falling. They just thought a three-word name would be too complicated to remember." They said that ages ago there had been four-legged, furry animals t

Several things aligned for this set of sketches - I was on a Star Wars spree after finishing Jedi: Survivor, was hunting for new fun ways to paint, and had expendable material lying about, and so upon deciding working with coloured backgrounds, I sketched jedi, of course. I need an airbrush (something that sounds so cool, but I only have ony roome to work in that isn't so easy to air while I work, and I have the feeling tht spraying a fine mist of paint will somehow, inexplicably, get into my breathing air as well. I heard airbrush artist complain about way more sinus problems a few years in, so workplace safety is a concern). While I love looking at very colourful artworks, mine are typically very saturated but lack variety, something I hope to fix with this method. The experiment continues! Each sketch is more or less the size of a postcard, the backgrounds are heavily textured from previous experiences; many have paint flakes in them or thickly-dried paint caked on (and some had

Once upon a time I thought cutting my own mats would be beneficial. I no longer remember what made me think that, other than that they would be immediately available instead of going through the somewhat irritating process of ordering them from my art supplier, at the same cost no less. Worse, I found cutting them nearly impossible with clean cuts, and being impatient, I returned to ordering my mats like a sane person. Leaving the mat boards, 60×80cm black boards with white core, unemployed. I had read about people using them to draw and paint on but the foamy core made me sceptical. Still - nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I used a mat board for this painting, to be entered into an international art magazine's competition (sadly I was not chosen as a finalist).  While the format seemed nice at first, for easier storage and handling, I cut it to 50×70cm.   Some time ago I went into the habit of collecting my leftover paints into a jar for further use, and use the greenish gre

The first image I created for Sons of the Singularity, a publisher of roleplaying games largely with Cthulhu and Lovecraftian content, and published with the gumshoe system for detective games, was actually in 2018. Since then I have steadily worked with them on several books on extraordinary images with art deco style or strongly limited palettes, even was tasked with a cover once.  

And sometimes things just go very quickly. When I sent some of my artbooks to family, one uncle called because he was mesmerized by the raven drawing. It's a 10×7cm charcoal and ink drawing I did on one of those small tryout pads for testing papers. He wanted basically the same thing but bigger, and I drew this 50×38cm, adding gold acrylic paint with a palette knife, and sent it off.