Ranarh's Art Blog

The Dakardsmyr region expansion for Uhrwerk's RPG Splittermond was published earlier this year. These are my contributions to it. The region is full of swamps and brimstone mines and cities slowly sinking into the swamp - it sounds pretty horrible to live at, but nice to paint ;)

A small series of acrylics sketches/paintings. All were done on differently toned papers and mostly from leftovers - paints from a previous painting, coin rolling paper, and some piece of paper that was left from a larger sheet I cut up. Underlying sketches were done in charcoal. I used the idea of head and hand on my sketchbook's cover and liked it, so I pieced some more together from photos. They aren't meant to be finished pieces. The ink outlines were applied with a brush and blown around with a drinking straw.

We set out for a session of the pen&paper RPG of Dragon Age, and I felt the need for tarot cards for the player characters, like those for the companions in Inquisition. It came in handy that those are small, and I could try a technique I wanted - painting over printed sketches before finishing digitally. I made pencil sketches in original size at 7×12cm in my sketchbook, cleaned them up and printed them on Canson 1557 180g/m² paper, broke out my worst watercolours for gritty effects and gave them some washes (gouache and watercolour pencils were also involved), scanned them back in and finished them digitally. It then turned out that despite using a printing template, it was quite difficult to align the fronts and backs in the print shop, but it was finally managed more or less, and laminated for endurance. Regrets: I would have liked them to be more art nouveau-ish, and, despite my massive use of digital masks, I'm note sure that the decoratively textured but clean look