Ranarh's Art Blog

My newest t-shirt design, now up for voting on Threadless.com . I love these two-colour images, but rarely find a reason to do them. They're a good exercise to decide how much is needed to get the point across, and the answer is usually, less than expected. [please vote on Threadless]

#26 from my Tiny Tips series , to provide absolute beginners with some helpful thoughts what to pay attention to. Tangents - when edges collide and confuse the viewer - are a compositional issue that many seasoned artists avoid without thinking. It's easily solved even in progressed states of the painting, but especially in very busy artworks one should look out for them.

An older character design I finally finished. I was inspired by Deus Ex 3 and Mirror's Edge concept art then.

Some folks aren't known for being inspiring. [please vote on Threadless] My latest design on Threadless, the t-shirt (and other clothes) printing company's community. Check it out, and if you feel like it, vote: https://www.threadless.com/designs/couch-potato-8

Some topics in art are prone to mistaken thoughts, and hard to get rid of - like, using reference is cheating (hint: it's not). In the spirit of "Ranarh's Tiny Tips", here is some compacted advice for the beginning artist on Custom Brushes. Custom brushes are hard to make Not at all. It rarely takes more than just a few steps to make them. There are plenty of easy tutorials on creating your own brushes from scratch, and many brush packs to download. Magazines often feature them, too. I can't paint without custom brushes You could of course paint an entire photorealistic painting with only one brush. But it's more difficult or will take longer than also using custom brushes. Understanding what you are painting is more important than the brush. Custom brushes are cheating Traditional media features many different brush types, and painters use all kinds of things to apply paint to a canvas: toothbrushes, sponges, buckets, their fingers, crumpled paper, c