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/