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 p...

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 fo...

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 yo...

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 y...

"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...

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...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ca...

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...

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 b...

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.

2025-05-03 20:43:13 +0000 UTC View Post

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 e...

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:

2025-05-01 14:53:01 +0000 UTC View Post

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...

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�...

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, ouc...

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 di...

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/Fi...

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 ...

“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....

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 c...

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 ...

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...

"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 listeni...

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, ...

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 Sanderso...

"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.

“...