Carian Stroll
“Tell Blaidd, and Iji…I love them.”
Before this piece, I had been wanting for a long time to create my own piece of Elden Ring fanart featuring Ranni. I had tried several sketches unsuccessfully, just wasn’t particularly feeling the ideas I had sketched up until that point.
One day of usual internet scrolling, I stumbled upon this gorgeous piece of art by Shimomura Kanzan.
I knew immediately I wanted to do something like this for my Elden Ring fanart. In fact, if you look at this piece, there is tons of inspiration that I drew from the original artwork, such as the style of the yellow leaves and the main subject matter being a prominent silhouette of the brightest value, placed at approximately the bottom third of the image.
The main character is cleverly shrouded amidst various layers of trees and foliage, giving us the impression that we're peeking into candid moment of their life. In the case of the fox, we caught it during a mid-day snack. In the case of Ranni and her party, we caught them in a leisurely stroll, while Iji outfits the dreaded Fingercreepers with their iconic rings.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to capture a happy moment, but Ranni goes as far as to ask us to deliver to Iji and Blaidd the message that she loves them dearly as her quest draws near its end. I would imagine they all must have had fun moments together as a family. Hey, maybe even the hands liked to be around them?
The process
I started this on my iPad using the procreate app. Sadly the full process is not captured on video, as I switched to Photoshop for the rendering phase of the illustration. This video is a fun window into my chaotic process and how I iterate on the fly on the same canvas. I probably wouldn't do that in a professional setting where you often need to have color keys and iterations to be reviewed and analyzed. I like to I cut myself some slack when doing personal art to keep things fun.
Trying and failing some more
This illustration was not a straightforward path. I haven’t been very diligent about personal art, and at some point I started deviating too much from my reference by adding too many levels of depth to the background and suffocating the piece. I got into a weird loop where I would randomly open the PSD, play around with the values, pushing Iji to the back, then bringing him back, cranking all the levers on Ranni, etc., decide it would look horrible, then begrudgingly determine I’d never complete this image and go on with my life.
As artists we likely have unfinished work sitting everywhere, be it in our sketchbooks, canvases, or hard drives. But it’s a different kind of sting when you feel like you can’t even nail the fundamentals.
Anyway, so a couple weeks ago, I decided to give it another go, but this time I would get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, even stuff that I had been trying to render for ages. I would not hold on to anything, I would try and recapture what drew me to Kanzan's beautiful painting to begin with.
After it became a matter of pushing and pulling pixels until the image was finished!
That’s about it. I didn’t go crazy in depth but lately I’ve been enjoying reading into artists’ processes and I’d be remiss to not share my own thought process also.