Ranarh's Art Blog

New pieces for my RPG character folder. All done with charcoal and chalk on A4 paper. An Iktotchi jedi temple guard from Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. A young Maraskanian pirate from the Dark Eye. A stealthy assassin from the Dark Eye. A world-class archer with a dark past from the Dark Eye.

As a beginning or starving artist, you look at pro artists' studios and wish you had all that great stuff they do. It'll come. For now though, there's a lot of handy not-so-pretty things around the house that cost you next to nothing. Here's some of my helpful garbage. Foto-frame glass plate. Glass withstands any medium - no amount of tape, acrylics, glue, or whathaveyou can harm it - and it's easy to clean when wet. I use it as my work table surface. This sheet is from a 40×60cm frameless frame; those come with smoothed edges, so the risk of cutting oneself is low. Such thin glass breaks easily though, and should be handled with care. I often bump the corners, which can be fixed with small bits of tape. Freezer bag. As any painter I put generous amounts of paint on my palette, and don't want to waste it. So I stick the whole palette into a freezer bag and tape it shut. It can keep paints useable for several days (larger amounts for weeks even). So...

...listen to their mothers. This quote from Dola's sons in the Laputa film is a recurring joke in crime families throughout fiction, and it always makes me laugh. I wanted to paint a classic subject, and dared the extra twist of an old wrinkled lady, which isn't seen so often in current fantasy. Acrylics on paper mounted to board, 40×30 cm. I'd like to get a good, heavy metallic frame for it, but I don't have the wall space to hang it up anyway.

At the start of the year I took some days off for crafting. This time I choose making paperbeads. I have a box full of inspirational papers that came it very handy, and I'm sure these will be helpful for reference images for painting sometime. Some resources I used: IFX wall calendar; gift wrapping paper; flyers from a butterfly park, and a horror themepark; advertisements for travel agencies; an artists' newspaper; coloured carton; envelopes; coin rolling paper; greeting cards; test prints. I haven't counted, but they are many.

During summer when I wanted to get to grips with actually making proper finished artworks on real paper after years of digital work, I created this three-part series of barley, cornflower, and poppy with pencils, ink pens, and acrylics. I had tried making WIP shots, but they turned out to be terrible. The originals are for sale. 28×38cm on paper, inks, pencils, and acrylics.

I've created the characters for a Star Wars RPG group for a client via deviantArt. They were joyful to paint and were delivered separately, and the group's gamemaster used them on individual binders for the players. Each character was done as follows: collaged the pose from photos and images according to the descriptions. Created loose marker sketches in Painter, followed by a tighter line sketch, and flat colours, which was send to the client for approval. After that, the silhouette was cleaned up with the lasso tool in Photoshop, and masks made for the entire figure as well as important pieces, like weapons. A first lighting pass with the airbrush on an overlay layer set the light. Each character was then finished using mainly the Worn Oil Pastel, Concept Art Jitter Smooth Chalk, and the Blunt Tip Marker.

I recently created the poster for the short film Hurricane, and was commissioned with creating a second poster as an alternative. https://www.hurricanethefilm.com