eller: iron ball (Default)
...or: Two people draw the same scene. Independently of each other, two artists decided to draw me ATCs with Koh (and some fire). :D It's funny, really: like, 50% of Kolthainn fanart (the part of it that's not random tetrahedra, anyway) happens to be of Koh; he's by far the most popular character, and people who look at my ATC folder without knowing any of the stories inevitably conclude he's "the main character". (This is technically not the case. Since Kolthainn ist not one story but rather this conglomerate of stories and art set in the same world, different stories have different protagonists.) I mean, I don't mind - Koh is the oldest character of the whole project (he popped up in my comments on some program code when I was 12, stupid, and writing a weird rotating tetrahedron simulation) and probably the most complex one (as in, he has a distinct personality that I as the storyteller don't have much control over - he's a person). It's just funny. XD Anyway.

Lumelievm drew this wonderful picture: Koh in the air! FIRE! So cute!!! :D :D :D (Also, I kind of love the color scheme...)



Simultaneously (because the pictures were mailed at the same time), Lethean drew this (and it has glitter and neon colors, too):



I'm so impressed! :D Both pictures are, of course, impeccable on the technical level. (I mean... It's just really, really awesome art, and I appreciate it a lot!) They also show exactly the same thing, which is a really funny coincidence. (I did not put them up to this, and to the best of my knowledge, they were not talking to eack other during the creation, either.) It's just that the styles are extremely different from each other, and the ways they treat character and scene are absolutely fascinating. (There's a lot of freedom for "fanartists" because for all that I like to draw, I don't draw Kolthainn stuff very often. Because I don't have much of a visual imagination, the characters started out without fixed visual designs, too. I mean, I draw them sometimes, but embarrassingly, some other people are much better at drawing them than I am. I can only draw flowers... People, not so much. Yes, yes, I should practice...) Also, probably unsurprisingly, I just went WHEEEEEEE when I opened those letters. I mean. I get all the BEST artwork! YAY!!!
eller: iron ball (Default)
OC questionaire meme, found in the journal of [personal profile] yhlee. I decided to answer the questions for my characters Dev, Deeyan and Koh (because they appear most often in my stories) as well as Ruon (because he's in the story I'm currently working on, so I should think about his characterization more). Behind a cut because not many people will care. XD )
eller: iron ball (Default)
Sooooo I received this lovely little sketchbook from [personal profile] yhlee. (Thank you sooooo much!!!) It's really tiny: 5x5cm (that's 2''x2''), blue, and it has watercolor paper. Niiiiice! It's just the kind of thing that makes me immediately want to start drawing! Also, the paper is so rough that I can't work with too much detail, which is an actual relief.


00-The-Book-kl


...but what to do with it? I decided to make it a personal thing and draw the characters from my own story/project/software/thingy (it's complicated LOL), Kolthainn. And while I haven't done any actual watercoloring yet, here's already the first five sketches! I just took a relatively broad ink pen and scribbled.


sketches-1-to-5-Kopie


So, uh, what do we see here?
- Deeyan, of course, is working on her telescope. Not visible in the (bad) photo, but she's actually holding a screw-wrench, and I'm sure interesting things are going to happen to that telescope!
- Dev looks at some crystals rather sceptically. That's all right: I'd be sceptical, too. I just scribbled something without paying attention to symmetries or angles or anything, so these crystals are highly dubious! Dev, of course, knows enough about crystals to see everything that's wrong with them.
- Yora wins at chess. What else?
- Ruon is playing the lute. That's an instrument I wish I could play (I love the sound!) but I'll never be able to: my hands are too small. The neck of these lute thingies is really broad. Fortunately, Ruon doesn't have any problems like that.
- Koh does what he does best cuddles a cat. He does that sometimes. XD (I think I've mentioned how Koh pictures ended up involving cats? It stuck.) He may be a demon, but he's all cute and cuddly! Really! XD

...and there's 18 more pages to fill! And then I get to color everything! :D

This is FUN.
eller: Koh with cat (Koh)
I saw the prompt "wings" on the [community profile] drawesome bingo card and couldn't resist!

Koh-watercolors-kl

This is Koh again, my favorite demon. And of course he's carrying a random cat! (For an explanation why Koh pictures always have some cat content, see here.

And of course I used my new selfmade watercolors. Night Glob was joined by two more globs of goo I'm very optimistically calling "artisan watercolors". So now there's also Day Glob (a warm orange-brown with some sparkle) and Forest Glob (a yellowish olive green with some sparkle).

imge002-bearbeitet-kl

Surprisingly, the colors actually work. Somewhat. I had designed Day Glob to be the more-or-less-complementary color to Night Glob, and they really play together nicely. So I guess this is my new sketching set... With maybe an additional sparkly rose red to set off that Forest Glob?

eller: iron ball (Default)
Okay, I had promised to show the awesome piece of modelling paste art I received in my advent calendar from the awesome Nil! :D (Thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!!)

01


Isn't it awesome? It's this huge metal frame (with five-fold symmetry; bonus points for that, it's a nice crystallography in-joke) with a whole modelled landscape inside! Cave, tree, leaves and characters are all FIMO, I believe (modelling paste that's very popular around here), the "water" is actually transparent so it's probably resin or acrylic paste, and inside the cave there's an actual rock. :D The characters are, of course, from my story/art/project thingy. The young lady relaxing on the water is Deeyan. The guy dangling his feet in the water is Koh. The guy in the background, ignoring everything else but the rock, is Dev. :D

02

Here's a view from above. Isn't all the detail amazing? One leaf and one tree unfortunately fell off in the mail (the whole thing was packaged really well, but, ahem, German mail services...) but I'll glue them back on; the positions where they were are really obvious by the indentions in the ground. And I do own acrylic paste, so... no problem.

03

This is my dad holding the whole thing in the air, the way this piece of art should be installed. Unfortunately, I still don't have a technical solution for that yet: due to solid metal, solid resin and solid rock the whole thing is really, really heavy. I don't want it to fall off the ceiling. I mean, I care more about potential damage to this piece of art than about any potential hole in the ceiling but the landlord might feel otherwise. Maybe I'll install hooks and put chains between them in pentagram shape - that would be very much in style but would also prevent me from ever having "generally normal" visitors again. (My personal version of "normal visitor" won't mind.)

04

And oh yes, transparent water is awesome. So is backlighting. This is so... AWWWWWW. Like, one of the coolest pieces of "fanart" (if it can be considered that; it's not as if there's something like a fandom for my commented program code, except it looks as if there is...) I've ever received. :D Anyway, THIS IS AWESOME.

eller: iron ball (Default)


This is a little collage (again, ATC format) I made a few weeks ago... As you can see, Koh is a demon (of the more-cute-than-scary kind), and he's busy lying on the floor doing some magic involving irresponsible handling of fire. I don't know exactly when I decided that using collage materials was the only way to go when it comes to illustrations of my own project. I had been quite unhappy with my own illustrations in the beginning, to the point that I threw most of them away. From the purely technical point of view, they were not worse than my other illustrations, it's just that they didn't feel right - they didn't quite capture the cheerfully whimsical randomness of the whole thing.

Actually, a lot of the credit for solving that problem belongs to another artist, who made this wonderful collage (clicky) for me. This came so much closer to the actual spirit of the project! (And, yes, also contains the appropriate nerd-dom. Everything on those sheets is entirely correct...) Incidentally, the original artwork hangs framed on my bedroom wall, because, hey, awesome!

So I decided to also go for implementing collage elements into my illustrations - never mind that the "technical quality" (yeah, whatever) suffers; I actually found that it helps me quite a lot to overcome my obsessive perfectionist tendencies when I know there are some elements of the whole picture that I don't have any direct control over anyway. :) And it's also really fun when other people send me random stuff in the mail and I then have to try to find some use for them. (Thanks to the whole of kakao-karten.de and swap-bot, LOL!!!) So, I guess I'm more relaxed when I make cards like these than when I make "serious" illustrations?!?

The collage materials found on my card are:
- Mother-of-pearl chip (I think it's supposed to be used for making jewelry but it sure makes a nice moon as well.)
- Washi tape with stars / constellations
- Washi tape with books
- Washi tape with marble pattern
- Wood veneer (yes, someone really sent me that in the mail, entirely randomly!)
- Silvery contour sticker of a spiderweb (I think this was supposed to be Halloween decoration)
- Tiny rhinestone
- Enamel dot in glittery gold
- Golden nail stickers (they were unlikely to end up on my fingernails - but as macic-y effect thingies they're nice)
- Puffy pentagram sticker (Who produces something like that??? Really, is there a factory somewhere turning out these things? LOL)
- Felt stickers (cats)

Actually, the cat thing is quite funny! I started out with only written character descriptions, and in Koh's case the description included his tendency to make friends with stray cats. The first ATC that someone ever drew of Koh (clicky) happened to include a cat, (and OMG that was 2009?!? Wow, this has been going on for a looong time!) and for some time that was the only visual reference in existence. (Mainly because I threw my own illustrations away, as mentioned.) The next artists then, apparently, took that as a hint that when Koh is in a picture, there have to be cats. Which is obviously untrue (there are quite a lot of Koh scenes in the story that do not involve any cats whatsoever, thankyouverymuch) but kind of fun when done systematically. I actually got these cat stickers specifically so I could make a Koh picture!

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