What's up? I'll tell you what's up!...literally

I realized that I haven't written anything this week, and that is sad, but I have a good excuse. I promise! I have been busy. Not at work really since I only worked one day this week, but with learning French and making illustrations. I was working for several days on the "Trinket defuses a bomb" image from my last post, and then jumped into a new project designing a tattoo for a friend of mine as a gift to her. Now I am working on a new image for the latest ArtOrder challenge, I'm hoping it will turn out awesome. I'm going to try to be humorous, which is not always my strongest suit. My stuff is cute, or nice, rarely humorous unfortunately.

I can't really say much about the concept as I don't like to share too much information before the illustration in question is finished, so you'll just have to live with it. Sorry. But I can give you a peek at a piece of the sketch!

Now this little fella is real miffed about something, but what?

It will however be uploaded to this page as soon as it is finished, and on Facebook, and Twitter and my portfolio website...It'll be all over the place so it should be hard to miss.

Now on a more serious note, I am having some trouble figuring out what my next post in the
"starting up  a business" project should be. Does anyone have any good suggestions for me? Anything you are curious about? A little help would go a long way. OOooh I just had an idea, literally right now, so at least there will be one post coming up shortly in the series.

Until next time
Anita K. Olsen

http://www.anitaolsen.daportfolio.com/

My entry for the Art Order "D&D Art Test Challenge"

Today is the deadline for the latest ArtOrder challenge, the "D&D Art Test". I have as I often do thrown my lot in. The result can be seen below:

I am really looking forward to seeing what all the other competing artists have come up with and which of the assignments they chose to go for. If you haven't heard of this challenge before you can find the details here.

This challenge is a big deal, as an artist who dreams of working for Wizards of the coast one day I really put in a high gear on this one and did a lot of reference research to create a Mongolian inspired town guard.

Personally I am very pleased with the colors and the textures. I didn't have time to do a step by step on this one but I do have the original sketch available.

I also did a male version of this character just for practice because I don't draw men very often. He turned out pretty ok, but I preferred the female guard personally.

Until next time,
Anita K. Olsen

Mighty Muggs

If any of my readers follow the ArtOrder blog, run and written by the fantabulous Jon Schindehette you might remember the recently finished Mighty Muggs challenge. The challenge was about designing a well known Dungeons & Dragons character/type on a Mighty Mugg figure. For those of you who have never seen one this is what a Mighty Mugg looks like:



I had decided to enter, but due to some family problems I wasn't able to finish my entry on time and had to miss out on it. Sad, but ah such is life. Anywhoot, I decided to finish my entry and post it her on my blog. I don't like letting a good effort go to waste and I was quite pleased with my concept as well.

So here you go guys, a sorceress inspired Mighty Mugg figure:



The plan was to paint most of her with acrylic paint. I was however planning to make her skirt out of shiny green organza. I was considering tulle but it's such a stiff material and it would be troublesome to work with. The decorations on her arms, outfit and hair was going to be green sequins. her hair I was planning to make from curly angel hair that you can buy in pretty much any craft store. Unfortunately that hair usually only comes in blonde colors so I would probably have to dye it or go online to find something in the right color.Not that it matters too much anymore, but I'm tempted to order the figure and make the sorceress anyway. We'll see :P

Until next time,
Anita K. Olsen

P.S. Don't forget to visit my online portfolio!