D I S A N T H U S . C O M

A commission for Ilona Andrews featuring Jack and George, two characters from The Edge series . I'm actually surprised I finished this one in a timely manner as I was working on another project at the time. Multi-tasking is not my strong suit :p

Another interior art from the Innkeeper/Maud novella: this time it's Ilemina who wears a very familiar-looking armor 🧐 Hmm, I wonder why.

This is a painted cover that I recently finished for an author. The commission was for a full cover, including a spine and back cover. Since the book isn't published yet I can only show the cropped version of the front cover. 

It's done! It's finally done! I have finally managed to finish this Derek painting. It's been years in the making. I'm not even kidding: the first sketch was done around 2013. The original idea was supposed to be the character we meet for the first time in the Kate Daniels book. When I decided to actually start painting him late last year, I felt it was more appropriate to paint the older version of the character. I decided to keep the sword from the original sketch: it's from Kate's weapons stash. I felt it was a nice homage to the younger Derek since he took the time and ended up choosing the sword for himself. Click to view larger image The novella cover I painted only showed part of his scarred face, and since there are quite the coterie of Derek fans out there, I confess I was a little intimidated at the prospect of painting his face in full view (please be kind to me, Derek fans). The initial concept was to have a dark background dominate...

Huzzah for "Better Late Than Never" posts! I've had this one sitting on my computer for a while ... just wanted to wait after the new layout and the Innkeeper stuff were done before posting Edward. I'm absolutely in love with Assassin's Creed IV - Black Flag . The naval gameplay is amazeballs.Truth! The first blond assassin in the series which threw me off a bit when I saw the first images. But now Edward has become my favourite character. Click to view larger image This painting underwent a few big changes. I initially painted him in his assassin's gear, but I actually like him much better as a pirate. I also liked the tattoo's from the trailer a lot more than the tattoo Edward has in-game (seems there are quite a few characters with the same tattoo, so I didn't think it was original enough). Plus, the tattoo in this painting includes the Jackdaw, so there. Click to view larger image Loads of details crammed into this painting, which to...

More Clean Sweep art post that I should have done days ago! This time it's Arland . There's also a wallpaper available :) I've also uploaded Dina to my gallery - this is the cover art for Clean Sweep :) The links below will go to my Deviant Art page. - View the finished ARLAND painting - Download the Arland WALLPAPER pack - View the finished DINA painting Posted by Doris | Follow me on Twitter

I've added a new painting to my dA gallery, the second in the Clean Sweep series. This one was was painted in a fairly short amount of time, so I didn't save that many progress images, something I usually do a lot because I'm paranoid that Photoshop is going to crash on me. Click to view larger image Click here to view the finished painting :) Anyway, I have also posted wallpapers of Sean and Caldenia: the zip folder can be downloaded from the links below (which will take you to my dA page). The wallpaper pack also includes wallpapers for iOS devices: Wallpapers: S E A N   |  C A L D E N I A Posted by Doris | Follow me on Twitter

So ... I totally forgot to make this post for my Kate Six painting. I only remembered to do this when I burned the entire folder on DVD (2,4 GB by the by) and came across my WiP images. Kate Daniels is probably one of my favourite book characters ever and I have actually painted her before but then my external hard drive crashed and I lost pretty much everything I hadn't backed-up in a long time. And then I wallowed in self-pity and I didn't do any painting whatsoever for over six months ... probably longer than that. But I always got back to Kate as a subject. I've re-read the books about two or three times now, mostly in preparation for the upcoming sixth book. It was just the right time to start with a new Kate painting. THE SKETCH & CHOOSING COLOURS So this process is something I rarely do anymore: I actually *gasp* sketched it. Ohnoes! I generally dislike sketching because it makes the process so much longer than usual - I'm a slowpoke, if you d...

This has been sitting on my computer for a while. Though the painting was posted in the gallery I never got around to uploading the WiP images. This was the first time I've painted a World Of Warcraft fan art, so it was interesting. Click to view larger image I had the greyscale thumbnail down reasonably fast, which is always good as I detest greyscale thumbnails ... This method doesn't always work out for me because I usually find it tough to add colours for the painting. Click to view larger image To get the actual colours I wanted was a bit of a painful process; I don't really like tweaking or filtering my colour layers over the greyscale because that just messes with my head. My personal preference is working in full colour. Click to view larger image But occasionally the greyscale process works out in the end; it's the 'getting there' that doesn't always make me a happy panda. I also didn't post the full-s...

Updated my deviantArt gallery with a new painting that was finished about a week ago. Since I was starting on a new Connor Kenway (AC3) painting I wanted to wait before uploading it, thinking I might add/change some things but I liked it the way it was :)The painting is titled Metallic Fancy because initially her top was supposed to be metallic-looking - though it still is, I suppose. But when I added all the jewel-tones, the metallic effect was a little lost among all those lovely colours :p My second Connor painting is on its way. I'm determined to finish it before the AC3 European release date on October 31st *fingers crossed* NOTE : Please do not re-post this image without linking back to this post or my Twitter account. Thanks :)

Stabby McConnor It's been a while since I actually sketched anything, and after viewing the Assassin's Creed 3 trailers and footage, I had no choice in the matter. I haven't been this excited about a game since AC2! Most of the time I do a very rough sketch in Photoshop before I start painting because I do tend to change things a lot during the painting process. Click to view larger image This time, though, I decided to go for the full sketch with all the bells and whistles. Sort of. The things I left out in the sketch were stuff I couldn't be arsed with because it would be so much easier just painting it in ... what? Don't judge me! I collected a whole bunch reference images of AC3 since I wanted to depict Connors' clothes as accurately as possible. I noticed tiny details that were changed from one image to the next: in the trailer, the buttons on his shirt has a red center; in other images they're just silver. His necklace only has...

I've finished a new painting titled Romance . This one took quite a while before I managed to finish it a few days ago. Click here to see the full painting in my deviantArt gallery. I started this about three or four years ago, but it was on the shelf for a long, long time. I wasn't really confident about my painting techniques in Photoshop, which was my biggest obstacle. Of course, I knew how I wanted it to look yet I hadn't a clue about how to achieve it. As I learned new things about painting in PS, I started experimenting with some ideas about achieving a certain look and feel of a painting: Tomorrow Today was the first step in the right direction. Later I started painting Olivia , which had the same overall theme, and I feel that Olivia is a more finished version of Tomorrow Today. Below the cut are the three paintings together (at last).

A new painting that was done in a day or so. I was actually finishing a painting I've been working on for a really long time (but more on that later), and I was listening to a track of the Snow Storm concerto by Sviridov called Winter Road so I got sidetracked because I love the track so much and I had to do this painting. It's more of a doodle than anything else, due to the fact that I wanted to finish it quickly rather than linger over every little detail, which I tend to do a lot ... unfortunately. Something that's interesting to note is that the main theme of the Metal Gear series sound a lot like Sviridov's Winter Road; coincidentally, MGS 3 is one of my favourite games ever :) The original "Snow Storm", or "The Blizzard", is one of five short stories from The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin by Aleksandr Pushkin. Snow Storm is the story of an elopement that ends tragically during a winter storm in Russia ... with ...

Click to view larger image And here is the full painting process of Julia, a character from Deanna Raybourn 's wonderful Julia Grey series. I doodled with several Julia's because I wanted to paint a companion piece to Brisbane, but that didn't really work for me in the end. Although this Julia ended up looking younger than I wanted, it still felt right to me. Click to view larger image Speaking of Julia: the latest book in the series, Dark Road To Darjeeling , was out earlier this month. I thought I had pre-ordered it, so when I checked my Amazon account to see when it would ship it turns out that I didn't pre-order it. So I had to wait longer than I thought, also due to Amazon being slower than usual this time around. I was so happy when it arrived, and found the cover so pretty that I wanted took some pictures of it. I also remembered that my aunt gave me this beautiful Indian sari years and years ago, so I thought, why not? Also, I'm in absolut...

Click to view larger image Here are some images of the painting process of Heartbeat of Gaia . I worked on this in the summer, which may be obvious by my choice of colours. I used some texture brushes I made a while back, but never really found a chance to use them. In this case, they worked surprisingly well. View the full painting Heartbeat of Gaia in my deviantArt gallery.

But only a wee preview ^_^; It's about 90% done. The original isn't in black and white, though, but after saving the WiP image, I desaturated the file to check on light, shadow and midtones (something I really should do more often). But now I like the B&W image a lot more than the coloured version! Anyway, Annette and I have been working on version 9 of Disanthus, so the current site won't be updated until 9 is ready to go. I reckon it won't be that long before it goes online :) ♣ Doris

Well, a new home, at least ^o^ We (as in, Annette and I) were completely disenchanted by LJ forcing fugly ads in our journal ... unless we paid , of course. So, it was time to find ourselves a new blogging home (because we're cheapo's at heart), and what better place than the original blogging platform right here. It's been very quiet at Disanthus.Com as of late, and we're leaving the site as it is for now, but we hope to update regularly on this blog. There are a few paintings I have finished since the last update on Disanthus, and below is one of them. (Image deleted) The painting is one of the main characters in Deanna Raybourn's Silent On The Moor book (the final one in the Silent trilogy); I'll not wax lyrical about Nicholas Brisbane because there simply aren't enough words to do him justice. So I've painted him instead. This was originally a speed painting I did based on Richard Armitage in North & South (The BBC mini-series), but Br...