Ranarh's Art Blog

The Inktober challenge was one of, or even the, first challenges I ever did in 2017 after having observed it for a while. During my blog hiatus, I still worked on it when I could. I enjoy sticking to the official prompt lists, which to me is the actual challenge and the most useful part, to learn to depict things that would not normally come up when working just by oneself. For purchases, contact me or visit my Etsy shop (which doesn't list all of the unsold pieces, sorry): https://www.etsy.com/shop/JSLArtShop Already sold pieces are indicated by the red dot. All images in larger size on Artstation My contributions from 2019 . All of them are on 17×25cm Bristol carton and typically done with either pens or brushwork; some use collage as well, one was stabbed, another cut to pieces and then re-assembled. All images in larger size on Artstation During Inktober 2020 I made no guidelines whatsoever and drew whatever I liked, with formats and materials as I saw fit that day; the brown ...

While I am catching everyone up on the past five (really, five?) years since my last posts, let's not forget the present - it is the most important time after all. Here is one of my recent fantasy character paintings. It is based on a sketch for a character by a client I have been illustrating an entire sci/fantasy world for. It was meant for the main character, and was one of several sketches we really liked, but only wanted one final image, so I worked on this in my own time later. These days I almost always create a 3D with DAZ Studio for the character and Blender for the lighting and scenery. They are typically not what I consider presentable so I am shy to show them off; they are wonky messes that give me just enough information to fill in the gaps when combined with photos. Photo reference would be better but is so much harder to come by it's often a hindrance to me, so 3D it is. Without further ado, here's a time-lapse GIF showing some stages of the process: drawing ...

A series of cats among yellow roses for which I was inspired by an adorable illustration by Djamila Knopf of her trademark quite scenes with dappled light. I was playing a lot with AI at the time and inspirations for the images with various models, then corrected them with photo references. I painted each on a different base, from book covers to mat board. They were meant as studies, not finished paintings, so I did not bother to polish them all that much. The are all acrylic and coloured pencils, with some ink pen for mostly whiskers (pesky whiskers. Painting cats big is better to have room for them and not leave them out, which feels wrong, or make them clumpy, which makes them look like plush toys). Except for the square one, they are 20×30cm. On the carton back of a watercolour paper block, some ink underpainting. This one also received a Daily Deviation badge on deviantart.com On the cover of a book about Finland with the silhouette of Helsinki embossed on the front, you can fai...

In 2018, I was contacted by Tobias Hamelmann, then editor of the German edition of the ShadowRun role-playing game published by Pegasus Spiele, about illustrating "Grimmes Erwachen" an adventure compendium book with a fairy-tale theme. In the ShadowRun world which is cyberpunk at its core, a cosmic event caused classic fairytale races to reappear, like dwarves and trolls, so the setting really lends itself to fairy-tales. I was given a very loose brief for the cover and complete freedom for the black&white interior. I decided to create illustrations with some graphic abstraction and a decorative border to replace the standard one. Grimmes Erwachen cover artwork I was since then invited to create covers and interior artworks for the books Neo Noir, Alpträume, Budenzauber, and Schattengeschäfte, all published by Pegasus Spiele. Every time I was given almost complete freedom about style and content of the images, which I happily used to experiment freely and used a slightly ...

Since my last pre-resurrection post was about my Month of Love pieces, I thought I would show off my contributions to the challenge since then. In February 2022, I was one of the offical artists in the last officially prompt-listed event, then co-led by the wonderful Jenna Kass. In 2019, the Month of Love (February) had the same subjects as Month of Fear (October) in 2018, which was a very interesting way of looking at the same ideas from two sides. The themes were beauty, blindness, tears, truth, and lies. Lies turned out to be one of my most liked images to date with the rats trying to cheer up a child living in poverty. Month of Fear 2019 dealt with monsters: monster within, without, above, below, and monsters unseen. I managed to create three out of five with traditional media. I had picked up acrylic pouring that summer and used it for the Cthuloid interpretation of Monsters Below, and collage and mixed media for the unseen monsters. I was most proud of the Monster Within image ...

My last post here was ages ago, following a period of fewer and fewer posts to begin with. I have since gotten into better habits of creating posts about my work, so I have decided to resuscitate this art blog with regular appearances again; the format of articles lends itself to how I like presenting my process and projects better than the image dump with ignorable text of social media. The first few posts will be looking back at what I've been doing lately, of course, to quickly catch up to present. If blogs aren't really your thing, you can follow me on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ranarh.draws/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ranarh.jsl FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/jsl.fans/ For online galleries, look at these sites: Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/ranarh Tumblr: https://ranarh.tumblr.com deviantArt: https://ranarh.deviantart.com/ To get into touch professionally: LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-s-lange Behance: https://ww...