Ranarh's Art Blog

Last year I was hired to create fifty illustrations including the cover for a puzzle book. The format was unusual because it was going to be triangular, like a mountain, because the overarching story between the riddles was a tribe of dwarves trapped by the magical queen (a bearded lady with a golden hat). Sadly, the book wasn't made, but I am still proud of the works I created for it. My first drawing to get the job of a dwarf. You can see my dwarves aren't actually very small. I enjoyed giving him some biker accents, because I imagine dwarves to be a lot like truckers and construction workers.    The design is still recognisable in the main protagonist Günther, who is younger and cleaner than this guy. When we discussed the style of illustration for the book, I came up with a few options. Everyone loved the idea of fully coloured acrylic illustrations; since it was to be the publisher's first book, we decided to go with black and white traditional ink in the end, with col...

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 answered a job ad on a website that was looking for illustrated fantasy maps. I do maps fairly quickly so I imagined it'd be your typical black and white book page, as much Middle Earth as can be of course. What we actually did though were large scale maps of known franchises. However, there were not many as the client and I quickly lost contact with each other and the producer apparently went out of business.

 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...