My little Character Fanart contest [link] has come to an end. Thanks a lot to you fine folk who participated!   Without further ado:

Winner

DoomsdayRenderer's My version of Amial gets the winning spot. I really like how my character Amial from Shrike is portrayed in this. Despite - or maybe because of - the minimalistic style the personality and overall 'feel' of the character comes across very well. She looks pretty yet sharp and somewhat intimidating. I can really imagine this to be my originally imagined character only portrayed in a different more comic-y style. Congrats!

Update: I now finished making the first prize -- a return-fanart for one of DoomsdayRenderer's characters. You can find my take on it here: [link] .

Very honorable second places (in order of arrival)

Merrak's Surrender is an ambitious landscape scene involving my dragon Ebb threatening a human settlement. Note the little guy with the white flag, which the title of the piece relates to. Lots of work went into this one and it's definitely worth seeing it full-size!


MissVirginia's Miss Jester is, as the title suggests, a variation to my Jester character - this time all in purple and baring some shoulder! Her smile is wide as always but here she has a bit of a predatory look to her, like she's checking someone out!


It was fun to see what everyone came up with, interesting that all picked different characters as well. Thanks again to all the participants!
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

I've been pondering how to celebrate the nice 100 000 view mark passed some time ago. Maybe it would be fun with a little competition!

Competition

Make your own fanart/interpretation of one of my (Griatch's) original characters!

Some examples:
The Jester [link]
Amial (from Shrike) [link]
The Unknown Girl (From Where Red Apples Lie) [link]
The green-skinned Troll Girl [link]
Blackback the Troll merchant [link]
Greater Grey Dragon Ebb [link]
 
There are many others. You can also pick any non-recurring character I've done as long as you can find it my gallery [link].

Rules

Deadline is a little more than a month from now, Friday April 19 at midnight GMT. Enter by replying to this journal with a link to your artwork. The image(s) must depict one (or more) or my original characters (as found in my gallery) but scenery, genre or theme is completely up to you (please no R-rated content though). You may enter as many times as you want. Any style, technique or computer program as well as any level of art proficiency is welcome.

Prizes

First place

I will completely non-democratically and subjectively pick one winning image. This pick need not be the most technically proficient image but simply the one that strikes my personal fancy for whatever reason (so don't feel bad if you are not picked). The winning artist will (if they want) get one of their characters intrepreted by me in return (you may pick which one I should try my hand at). I won't interpret copyright-protected characters though, so please only your own characters or characters you have the right to use. This fan art image will be released under creative commons. The winner will of course also get a honourable spot in my journal.

Second places

Yes, everyone else gets an honourable second place!
All second places will get a prominent spot in my journal and I will comment on every contest entry. Also, if you explicitly tell me (when you submit your entry) that you want feedback on your work I will endeavour to write a full critique of it to the best of my ability. (Note that I will then give a honest (but hopefully constructive) critique, so if you are sensitive about these things, don't ask for it).

Finally ...

... Have fun! Take this as a chance to practice or try new things maybe.
I have no idea how much interest there is in a contest like this, so looking forward to seeing how it goes.

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

For lack of time for other projects I'm mostly keeping up the artwork-ing by throwing together entries to the Deviant-Deadlines challenges [link] at the moment. Deviant-Deadlines is a DeviantArt group with an interesting concept - every week a theme is announced. Everyone has one week (Friday to Friday) to create an image inspired by that theme, and the one who picked the theme last then decides which of the entries they like best. That "winner" gets to pick the next week's theme to judge. And so on.

It may be veiled as a very light sort of competition but that's really just an excuse for keeping the chain going. The main goal is to motivate people to create something, anything, and to force them to finish it before the deadline. The skill or quality of the result is not really that important, the main point is to keep being creative - a good notion.

Deviant Deadline's weekly challenge has been running for close to 100 weeks now, and whereas the number of entries vary dramatically, it's really nice as a way to kick oneself into doing some artwork. Having a deadline does help!

Deviant-Deadlines: [link]
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Following tradition, my Christmas Card for this year is up. I try to do it in a reasonable time before Christmas so I (and those of you that want to) have time to get postcard prints. An early Merry Christmas, folks.

Watched Wave

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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

100 000 page views to the gallery since me joining DeviantArt! Thanks everyone for visiting, commenting and critiquing over these years!

As it turned out, I was myself the 100 000th visitor.
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Back into gear, autumn is here.

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Summer is here. Lots of work stuff going on, little time for art. Ah well.
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

I'm humbled and amazed that my Christmas card from this past Christmas, Vättebron

has continued to be faved also after the holidays and has now amassed a for me unprecedented 500 favourites! Thanks everybody!
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Griatch

~~~
All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Well, looks like GIMP 2.8 is finally on the way. It's been on the way for a long time of course, but now the release candidate is out. So we are a few rounds of bug fixes to go until final release. Whereas I have in the past compiled the development version of GIMP (2.7.x) to have something to play with, I haven't kept up with this version. It's not that I'm not looking forward to the new version, it's more a matter of priorities than anything. For the kind of work I do, GIMP 2.6 is more than enough for my daily use. Also, 2.7.x has felt a lot more unstable than previous dev versions I think - enough for me to not want to do production work on it. It will be fun to test out the new brush dynamics as well a the layer nesting - single-window mode is not of much use for me and never was.

... I also just realized that I will probably have to re-do my massive Beginning GIMP tutorial now too. Gah.
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

2012, and I have a new snippet of Where Red Apples Lie gradually coming out over the next half-dozen of weeks, seven pages all in all. It's interesting to experiment with the black-white-red style of this, quite different from my normal paintings. The most fun bit is always the storytelling though, hopefully I'll eventually get to a point where I can tell a story without bogging down too much in doing the artwork to match it.
Current snippet, Silent Treatment

Older, finished snippet The Unknown Girl from another part of the larger story (introduces one of the characters more):

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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

My Christmas card for this year is out.

I'm a bit early with it, so I have plenty of time to get them printed and write personal Christmas greets and so on. It's a nice tradition to make these I think. After all, I rarely use the postal system for anything else these days. This and the previous cards are all available as prints if you want to get one for yourself.

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Some of my tutorials are very image-heavy, racking in about 60-70 images per tutorial. This makes it important that all those images work. The issue of unreliable image hosting has followed me over the years. I have always hosted my tutorial images on various "free" image hosts and have gone through a lot of them, from the ill-fated imageox to pictiger to imagehost.org with a few in between. All of these either dropped the images after a while (despite saying they wouldn't) or simply went belly-up. Guess running ads on a free image hosting service is not much of a get-rich scheme in the long run ...
... Anyway, I have now gone through all my tutorials and with some considerable effort re-hosted all of them on Picasa. Hopefully Google is big and stable enough not to go under anytime soon.

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Not that I'm by no means more than a happy amateur in making comics, but I thought I'd at least put down the steps I found worked for me in the making of the nine pages from Where Red Apples Lie. I used three open-source programs interchangeably: MyPaint, GIMP and Inkscape. You can find a link to the new tutorial from my tutorial list [link] . Enjoy!
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

New year and back to work; lots of it as usual.

Art-wise, I'll this month begin to release a few pages (nine to be exact) from my rather strange unpublished black&white&red graphical novel Where Red Apples Lie. What's being put up will be a stand-alone little sequence from somewhere in the larger story. It reiterates that you can indeed tell a tale about anything ... so stay tuned.
I also took the chance to document the work-process, so expect a GIMP/MyPaint/Inkscape comic tutorial some time in the future.
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

This year's Christmas card is out - Good neighbours.

It's becoming a tradition!
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Lots of astronomical work and other projects going on, little time for art at the moment. So many things to draw, so little time ...

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Wow! Thanks a lot all you people who has dropped by to watch ,comment and to offer critique!
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Griach

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

Plenty of stuff to do, as per usual. Arranging and hosting an astrobiology workshop. Holding plenty of talks for the astronomy-interested public. Writing papers ... Not much time for anything else.
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

February came around. January didn't feel quite as short as it use to, maybe because I've had so much to do. Got a few images up at least, got into experimenting with more realism again.

More techie news - MyPaint [link] , the second in my main array of digital art programs (the first one is GIMP) has been updated to a much anticipated version 0.8. You can find a mini-review of mine on GimpTalk [link] . I've been using the development version for a long time now, but this is great news for people who can not or will not compile from sources.

Finally, thanks to all visitors that brought the pageviews of this gallery up above 40 000  this weekend!
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .

A new decade started, how in the world did the old one go by so fast...?
Anyway, slowly getting back into gear after the holidays, we'll see if I'll have time for any artwork one of those days even...
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Griatch

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All my work is done with open-source software. If you are interested in the art tutorials I have done, you can find them all here: [link] .