Ranarh's Art Blog

I learned about this back in school. It has come in handy for balancing compositions, even if it is far from exhaustive.

I had long plannend a calendar and finally got around: you can get the 2014 calendar on my deviantArt account. For lack of private paintings across all categories, it is themed around my world  Genius Loci .

Two of the characters I did for the recently published Terra Superior supplement of the NOVA rpg http://www.nova-rpg.de/

A character illustration oo sorts - Radseri is the guy happily floating there held by the spirit's tentacle/tail-thingy. It's for my world Genius Loci, whose development you can see on my worldbuilding blog starmakersgaze.blogspot.com . I made the tail segments for the two larger spirits in Sculptris and painted largely in Painter.

This started as a rather random idea developed from a few nature photos I liked, but I quickly developed some narrative and left my comfort zone with all the birds.

Practicing some sci fi form language. Took too long, but I'm happy with the results.

I came up with this while testing the new mapmaking method I recently worked with, and also took it as an opportunity to practise some French. I'm thinking about giving it up for adoption, so maybe someone could invent an actual backstory for it.

My map goes along for a while. Every now and then I add details; I place the capitals (various maps use stars, squares, circles, castles etc to indicate them. I use bordered circles by dotting them with a full-opacity brush and choosing Stroke in the Layer effects menu in Photoshop). I decide I want islands and soon despair because creating them with the lasso is tedious and provides ugly, repetetive results. I resolve the matter as follows (this should have been done much, much earlier, so make sure you do this step as one of the first): In a new file in Photoshop, I choose Render>Clouds, then Render>Difference Clouds several times. Then on a Levels adjustment layer I push the sliders until my "clouds" are only black and white (could also be done with a Posterize layer, set to 2 levels). Ta-dah, these will be my coastline and islands! I cut, paste, transform and rearrange to my heart's content, erasing the water (I still have a file with the water on a separ...