Ranarh's Art Blog

Because challenges are so much fun, I tried a new one in 2018 by testing Mermay for myself; it turned out that the theme wasn't really for me, but I still dutifully followed the official prompt list and did get fun out of it. There were some small drawings in my A5 sketchbook in a grotesque style I had been admiring (and would love to do more often), and one large drawing I was very proud of (and even sold shortly after, when it was still a small miracle for me every time someone bought an original from me). It's charcoal and chalk on 43×61cm, and with that also one of the larger drawings I had done then. The dusty medium wasn't ideal to get all the fine detail in, the pieces by other artists are typically done in graphite, which again I do not like very much. I blame those rotten office pencils I had to start doing art with because my grown-ups couldn't care less about proper pencils and there was nothing else in the house. I managed to create another large drawing lik...

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 ...

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 ...

The final painting and some WIPs for the current Month of Love challenge under the subject "Red". It's acrylics and oils on 60×50cm primed paper. Don't forget to head over to my Tumblr account to see way more stuff! https://ranarh.tumblr.com

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.