Jenny Dolfen

Dalinar lineart redone and sixfanarts

Those of you who check the discord will have seen the sad journey of this Dalinar piece that ended in the wastepaper basket (with a detour to "when life gives you oranges"), so here's the new lineart. I‘ll do it in watercolour, avoiding new experiments.

I also thought that #sixfanarts would be a good way to practice gouache more! So give me all you've got. We'll do this differently this time, and I‘ll choose among the characters you give me, and I‘m still...

Shallan sketching

Or:

In a meeting, sitting and sketching Shallan sketching as she sits in a meeting.*

(*This is a ketek, a form of poetry in the Stormlight Archive, where the words in a sentence are mirrored, allowing for minor changes for inflections. I thought that was wonderfully meta. Does that count as performance art now? =D)

Made the most of a teacher conference today. There was a brief consi...

New lineart approach (Dalinar, Oathbringer spoilers)

I came across an Instagram tip a while ago now that had this interesting approach to the transition from sketch to lineart: all of us who work that way know how hard it is to preserve the sketch's momentum and movement, and often simply correct anatomy, in the lines. This approach suggested that, as opposed to drawing over your sketch and trying to hit it again, you erase the stuff from your sketch that doesn’t contribute to the overall idea. I'd never really done that, but I figured a goua...

Dalinar (Oathbringer spoiler)

"I AM UNITY!"

You might say I‘ve snubbed Dalinar in my art so far.

Or you might say I waited to give him this moment. It'll be a proper painted piece, not in my sketchbook this time.

I get to paint hundreds of golden bubbles! Yay! Yay for gouache, especially.

Reminder, since it’s been years since the last traditional (non-sketchbook) piece: Patrons can chime in at any time if they'd like to claim first dibs on original art! 😊🥳

"Why he froze"

She wrapped her arms around his right arm, like a child clinging to a favored toy. Worried. Frightened. “Something’s wrong inside you. But I don’t know what.”

(Oathbringer)

New gouache piece. I managed to totally ruin Kaladin’s face at the very last minute; what you see here is me cheating by fixing the image in post. 😂 I'd taken photographs in between and merged the last version of the face with the final photo.

I'm glad this ...

Tien (and Bippy)

I wasn't going to paint both of these today, but then I was really disappointed with how Bippy turned out, and am glad that I pushed through to paint Tien as well. And BOY, did I paint Tien. The paint did all that I wanted. The ugly stage on the uniform and breastplate didn’t faze me. And what’s most important: a few days ago, I thought, what’s the point in learning gouache if I still don’t like what the results look like? Here's my answer: faces. Skin. Painting with this absolutely <...

Just two sketches today

Had a long day at school (with teacher-parent talks into the evening) and was too drained for gouache afterwards, but managed two sketches in off moments. Two very different ones. Above: "He actually smiled" - the last moments in Tien's life. I tried to pull off a breastplate that could fit two of him. 💔

Below, very different in tone: Bippy the ethically sourced flamespren. Tell him he's the goodest boi and he'll light your hearth.

2025-05-07 19:25:27 +0000 UTC View Post

Gouache, day six: REALLY getting the hang of things

Missing scene from the Stormlight Archive: Kaladin's mother Hesina, heavily pregnant with her third child, gets a letter from the army that Kaladin was dead, four years after he wrote to them saying his brother was dead. (She tells him later they got this letter just after he was made a slave, either to spare them the shame, or to discourage any inquiries into his fate). The upside down faces by the wall are agonyspren, which we see only a couple of times in the books.

I had a lot of ve...

Art folder: Dark Elves (Drizzt books and OCs)

A drow-y trip down memory lane! I read the Drizzt Do'Urden books by R. A. Salvatore in my mid-twenties (and did several illustrations of them), but not before my husband had DMed an adventure based on them. My favourite RPG character in those days was Jhael, a rogue/fighter (if I remember correctly). We also had a Spelljammer campaign a little earlier where I played a half-drow named Arami, but the campign never really took off. The media here are a wild mix of pencil, rare watercolour, Painter...

Gouache, 5th May: Shallan

After pulling off a non-human portrait yesterday, I wanted to try a human one, and Shallan volunteered (also because I wanted to do the skin rather translucent and more squarely in comfort zone territory) that wouldn’t have worked with Kaladin.

I like parts of this, but there’s also the question how smart it is to try to achieve the sorts of results in an unfamiliar medium that I know to do perfectly well in a familiar medium.

What I want to do is to do something like a cre...

Rlain in gouache

I finally summoned up the courage to finish Rlain! And boy, did this WORK. I used an idiosyncratic mix of watercolour techniques and gouache paint, and it worked out surprisingly well.

Steps:

My next project in gouache will be to use less punchy colours. 🫣

Art folder: A Song of Ice and Fire, 2003

Here's the art I did after reading the Song of Ice and Fire series! Well, the first three books. This was before A Feast for Crows came out and I lost my interest in the series. All of these are from 2003, so eight years before the HBO show came out.

Also, I love the thrill.

😂

3rd May: fairy circle and some things working

A good day. A lot worked today - painting something both small and intricate, trying out different brushes for different things and starting to get the hang of which works for which. Some semi-transparent stuff too. All in all, I think I’m starting to build confidence.

And guys - I’m painting. On paper. TINY STUFF. Without ending up with a splitting headache for the rest of the day. I really thou...

Gouache, day two (closer to four, I think)

Stayed true to my decision to do something in gouache every day this month, with a pretty nice one of chamomiles, a pretty bad colour gradient, and a watercolour underpainting for Rlain. Watercolour has two advantages over gouache - I can do an underpainting that won’t dissolve when I paint over it with gouache, and I can easily do a colour gradient that I find much harder to do in gouache at my current skill level (or lack thereof).

More on Rlain tomorrow 😰

MayTheGouacheBeWithYou

May… as in a May challenge… with gouache… no?

Yeah, I just came up with that on the fly, but I'm kind of determined to do one tiny bit of gouache every day this month. Even it’s just a flower or a gradient.

Daughter and I sat down again for two hours and I came up with this:

Seeing what different brushes can do with gouache. And having some breakdowns and some breakthroughs. So...

Sketches (Syl and a mousy barbarian)

I'm still wildly determined to learn gouache. So naturally, what I‘m not doing is gouache. 😂 I'm buying stuff (hey, I haven’t bought art materials in four years!), and do sketches I may or may not paint, and I‘m absolutely doing all the mental groundwork for really, really convincing gouache paintings. Really. You'll see. 😆

I really wanted to sketch Syl manifesting on her swing, and she looks so cute here! Talking about cute, what I also wanted to draw was the character I pl...

They say that for every good painting…

… you have to get past a hundred crappy ones (particularly in a new medium), so I figured I‘d better get those out as soon as I could. 😆Journey before destination indeed.

Just vibing and aimlessly putting paint on paper, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and more importantly, why they work and why they don’t. Some things did work, and in some cases, I have an idea why ;) I did find it amazing how important brushes are when it comes to even application of paint! So far, fil...

Sketch: Rlain

Sketch of Rlain I'm hoping to turn into a gouache painting. My first time drawing a Listener, too!

I did a sketch of him in my sketchbook yesterday, then ruined it with the first layer of gouache, and did NOT photograph it first, so it seems I‘ve hit a major roadblock with gouache. My sketchbook is full of those, ouch. Why do I keep doing this? Why do I get back into traditional art with a medium that, historically, has been full of roadblocks? No idea, but maybe the next attempt wil...

BSFW (barely safe for work) Kaladin 🤭

It seems Shallan got her hands on some gouache. 😶‍🌫️

Tried out my Procreate gouache set, and found that working on top of a fairly refined sketch (the one from a few months ago) is a good and unscary way to get into gouache rendering. Not really the look I want to go for when I‘m grown up, but that's been difficult for me for a long time. The Gandalf I posted earlier today comes closer to that, but there are images that lend themselves to pastelly, creamy colours more easily...

Testing around

The whole book-painting idea got my head whirring (to the point that I bought a few Tolkien books and The Way of Kings to paint, which gave rise to my seventeen-year-old daughter treating me to a "girl, CHILL!" when the latter arrived), and I did a sketch for possible Tolkien books embellishments. I transferred the Fëanor/Fingolfin/Finrod sketch to the book side via transfer paper, and then went and completely ruined it because I thought coloured pencil was a good idea for book edges. Full d...

Fore-edge painting

My daughter got me into fore-edge painting. 😳

She’s been gushing about print-edged editions in bookshops (and bemoaning the fact that 99% of them are Romantasy), tried some fore-edge painting with markers herself, and got me thinking about how to best do it. We got some clamps and felt, and well, I have every sort of paint in existence. Today, Jana got some of her least favourite books for us to ruin, and we set to work, with watercolours, liquid acrylics and gouache.

I can n...

“No mating!”

She pulled close. “And so, in reality, you’re the greatest at relationships there ever was. You ruined only the wrong ones, you see.”

He leaned down. His breath smelled of spices, his uniform of the crisp, clean starch Dalinar required. His lips touched hers, and her heart fluttered. So warm.

“No mating!”

Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

2025-04-15 06:28:18 +0000 UTC View Post

Old art drop! (Happy ten years of Patreon!)

Whooo-hoo! Ten years ago, I launched my Patreon as an attempt to free up my time for more of the stuff I love to draw. A whole bunch of people (a lot of them still here, bless you!) signed up and have been with me on this journey all these years, others of you have joined the ride over time.

With the arrival of my eye condition, it's become more important to me than ever, so I have a lot to be grateful for, for you to have stuck with me through it all, despite the wild ride it's been so...

Art Folder: Tolkien art 2003-2004 (Elfwood / deviantArt era)

You probably know I've purged all my art quite completely off the net. That was never a conscious decision; it was first sites that were just accumulating spam and hateful comments (deviantArt, Facebook) or that scraped art for AI slop, or at least did nothing to stop it (Twitter, Wordpress). So a few people have asked whether there is any place on the net where my older art can still be found - and now, there is! I do trust Patreon (for now) to protect art from the most blatant theft, and have...

Chaperone (sketch)

One of the most hilarious chapters in all of Stormlight Archive is when Shallan and Adolin, not-quite-betrothed but very much in love, wonder whether it’s appropriate for them to dine together on Shallan's bedroom floor, so she tells her spren Pattern to be their chaperone. Of course, Pattern has no idea what a chaperone is or does (his first association of "something inappropriate” is dividing by zero), but he quickly catches on that it's accidental mating he has to watch out fo...

"Why do you care?" (redraw)

It’s come to this - revisiting “old” art I drew four months ago 😅 This was the second ever Stormlight art I did, and I wasn’t that happy with it from the start - especially as I drew it from memory after only listening to the scene once. This is much better now! Kaladin’s looks like Kaladin, he's sufficiently wet and a mess, as he should be.

Another one I may have to redo at ...

Welcome to the party

Kaladin put his own back toward Adolin, preventing either of them from being attacked from behind.

“What are you doing here, bridgeboy?” Adolin hissed from within his helmet.

“Playing one of the ten fools.”

Adolin grunted. “Welcome to the party.”

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

You might have seen this progress on Discord (if you haven’t, you can often see some of my art in development over there, along with thoughts on...

Sketch: Welcome to the party

Kaladin put his own back toward Adolin, preventing either of them from being attacked from behind.

“What are you doing here, bridgeboy?” Adolin hissed from within his helmet.

“Playing one of the ten fools.”

Adolin grunted. “Welcome to the party.”

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

I mentioned how WoR was my favourite book in the series, right?

I pulled off something very important with this one - I built the scene...

"I accept this journey" - big Wind and Truth spoilers

Finally! This one has been in the works for… four weeks now? Major cropping and squaring did the trick, and now I'm happy. Still love Kaladin’s face here.

Thank you, the Wind said. Herald.

“Kaladin,” Syl said. “Your eyes.”

“What about them?”

“Dark brown,” she whispered, her hand raised to touch his face. “Like they used to be.”<...