Ranarh's Art Blog

Once upon a time I thought cutting my own mats would be beneficial. I no longer remember what made me think that, other than that they would be immediately available instead of going through the somewhat irritating process of ordering them from my art supplier, at the same cost no less. Worse, I found cutting them nearly impossible with clean cuts, and being impatient, I returned to ordering my mats like a sane person. Leaving the mat boards, 60×80cm black boards with white core, unemployed. I had read about people using them to draw and paint on but the foamy core made me sceptical. Still - nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I used a mat board for this painting, to be entered into an international art magazine's competition (sadly I was not chosen as a finalist).  While the format seemed nice at first, for easier storage and handling, I cut it to 50×70cm.   Some time ago I went into the habit of collecting my leftover paints into a jar for further use, and use the greenis...

And sometimes things just go very quickly. When I sent some of my artbooks to family, one uncle called because he was mesmerized by the raven drawing. It's a 10×7cm charcoal and ink drawing I did on one of those small tryout pads for testing papers. He wanted basically the same thing but bigger, and I drew this 50×38cm, adding gold acrylic paint with a palette knife, and sent it off.  

I almost never do anything that's funny out of my own volition. Which is weird. But I have the theory that cool images, impactful images, the kind I want to put into the world, are not typically the funny kind. Obviously funny memes and images are memorable, but they're not what I seek out. That doesn't mean I can't do funny! A D&D game master asked me in 2018 to illustrate a bunch of weird beholders, not with the classic dozens of eyestalks but with ears or mouths, and here we are. They are absolutely disgusting. Following those, we also created a bunch of other illustrations for the role-playing campaign the client was mastering at the time where the mechanical pet mouse Hubert of one character ran off with some psychopomp named Jim, and sent the player postcards of their exploits as they stole on parties or met the gods. I used a rather different style with selections and layers effects rather than my usual painterly way of making images for this to speed things ...

 When I try new things - new materials, a new medium or technique - as probably many artists, I often draw and paint human portraits. Just as often though, I do birds. They are great for trying something; they have simple shapes, are often colourful, and many are cute. There is a surprising (or maybe shocking, given the quality of some) amount of materials around my studio that are nearly worthless, or at least no longer wanted, and whose mere presence irks me sometimes. I want to get rid of them, but I can't make myself throw them away, so the goal is to use them up; productively, if possible. The papers I bought for small charcoal drawings, the kind I do on conventions, are nice but some are better and some less so, and the less-so ones had to go. At the same time I had water-soluble oil pastels that were not quite so convincing, but I hadn't worked with them often, and fortunately also had a box of nice Faber-Castell oil pastels to supplement the former. The oil pastels draw...

The Smaugust challenge asks to draw one dragon per day during August. I've long wanted to participate - for some reason, despite being mainly a fantasy painter, I have almost zero dragons in my body of work - but with Inktober coming up the following month I was usually busy doing things for that. When AI became a huge thing last year I fiddled with it for a bit and created my Smaugust pieces by overpainting AI renders from different models. I am interested to see where the law debate about AI in general and generative image creation in particular leads. There are GIFs for many of them to show what I used and how, but I think many are outdated already; if not detailing technicalities about the models, I'll make another post with the process GIFs. The high seas wyrm The protector Snapdragon Red rising Desert swimmer Fire of creation Master of the fiery serpents Stranded Westward Into the fire Dragonriders Primordial Roadtrip with Mom First fire On a pile of gold Curled A god com...