Ranarh's Art Blog

More illustrations for the novel series Rhoenoak by John Enitsu.

While the title is an obvious quote to the second Star Trek film, the tutorial deals not with spaceships and macguffins, but the issue of shadows in the basic sense. I found them hard to understand in the beginning; I used always the same lighting, never the right colours, and terrible edges. Shadows are the flipside of the lighting scheme of the painting and must be treated carefully. Mostly, they are more saturated than one would think. They are also not objective, but seem "more right" when they are of slightly contemplary colour (e.g. purplish, or cool shadows for warm skin). There's also much more going on in the shadows than one thinks - it's not a flat plane of darker colour. Adding a new lightsource to make sure ths shadows aren't pitch black opens another stage to fill. One more trick I've learned: the terminator (the line where shadows turns into light) looks nicely with a line of more saturated colour blending between the two. This has done wonder...

Early this year, harpies began crowding in my sketchbook, and have by now become a small world with a total of four harpy tribes in various degrees of human shape. These are the most human-like, without wings (I think) and only claws on their hands and scaly legs, but they rely heavily on magic to try and suppress the other three tribes. Right now there are some ink drawings, a charcoal face study and 3D model, this painting and lots of sketches, with another larger painting already on its way to the canvas (meaning, it's sketched and modelled, but I need to find the time).