Ranarh's Art Blog

And some more of the ongoing work I'm doing for author John Enitsu 's Rhoenoak novel world. These are the keeper of Lyrium plains, a majestic white stag; the unforgiving Mirage wasteland; and Soliterus plains, where the plumbra come to the waterholes to drink.

CGSociety and Wacom called the DrawCember challenge - draw something every day until the 22nd Dec. Democratically, we didn't have to use a Wacom thing for it, so there were some interesting things going on in the CG Talk forum including ink drawings. My contributions started with portrait exercises, but I have since moved on to using the prompt list (mostly). Find the thread below if you like, and these are all the drawings from the 6th onwards. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=458&t=1477696

Disregarding its somewhat disgusting name, the Daily Spitpaint group on Facebook has entertained me with providing several prompts per day to work with. These are my exploits so far: Hanging Cages, Grumpy Old Man, Spinning Top, Tailor Measuring, Looter.

For the upcoming game Hell's Arena, this infographic of hell depicts the nine circles according to Dante's timeless masterwork, the Divine Comedy. The premise was to make it informative but keep it gritty and maybe look for a new way of doing it, so I chose to make the circles themselves the tortured souls - I really had to switch off all empathy reading the punishments, being kept in burning coffins, torn apart and eaten, being incinerated and resurrected into eternity - but according to Dante, it's all fair. Who knows. I looked at a lot of Keith Thompson's work for inspiration, and drew it with pencils on A3 paper before colouring it digitally.

A new sketchbook is due, and I created this cover for it in inks. There were pretty cool images for the InkTober challenge on deviantArt by Konstantin Vavilov that I was inspired by. I tried using my dip pen nibs for the white ink but failed (the cover carton didn't like the scratching) and used brushes instead, which is why the lines are so wonky. Finally, the interior patterns in the shapes were done with pens.

A drybrush drawing on 65×50cm paper. It's based on one of those sketches you doodle and that just work; I put some effort into making the twigs interesting. The paper behaved very much like I hoped - quiet and obedient despite the wet medium - although it didn't like me using a tiny bit of wash on the hands, but it lay down again. The original is available on Etsy, https://www.etsy.com/listing/561310180/branching-hands

A map I created for Dave Willmarth's Greystone Chronicles. It's a fantasy novel set on Jupiter's moon Io! And the city of Stormforge is set in a dormant volcano's caldera. "The Greystone Chronicles: Book One: Io" Online https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076FN84HY/

The Muddycolors blog called a colouring contest that I just had to take part in. The image was provided by Annie Stegg from her new colouring book, and was great fun to work on. The contest was divided into digital and traditional colouring - I had to make things complicated of course, and used Painter's Watercolour Brushes that emulate traditional media very well. And eat up ALL the available space of your computer - I could barely get a text editor to work alongside that. The winners will be announced after Thanksgiving, so keep your fingers crossed!

A drawing for a character from the story of a friend. The setting constitutes a Rome with magic, so I could go all in with toga, gladius, and fireball. Nice. 50×65cm, charcoal on paper.

A series of character portraits I did for a vague idea of a cyberpunk setting. The movie-style lineup came around when I was figuring out how to best present all on one image. There were some in-progress shots on facebook and patreon. The story isn't all that detailed yet, but I'll try to find the time to create a bit of world around theses guys. https://www.facebook.com/jsl.fans/ https://www.patreon.com/jenniferlange

The final days of Inktober have come and gone, these are the last drawings I made for it. There was also an awesome badge for Inktober survivors but I can't find it anymore, so if you stumble across it, send me a link, will you?

I paint my sketchbooks' boring grey covers before using them, and this is my current book started in September.

The almost last week of Inktober. The original idea by the founder was to train using inks, and it works for me. Hopefully this can be an incentive to keep up training episodes better in other fields as well. The prompts I used from the official list, in order: Trail, Juicy, Blind, Ship, Squeak, Climb, Fall.

Three covers for the first three books of TJ Muir's fantasy novel series, Book 1: On Borrowed Luck; Book 2: Before the Luck Runs Out, and Book 3: Between Luck and Magic. Patrons have learned some more about the first on Patreon , and the trilogy will be released shortly.