Jenny Dolfen

Inktober #29: Ronja the Robber's Daughter

I've still got some ten characters on my list and am down to drawing straws - but I couldn't really leave out Ronja. 

Ronja was my first female heroine. As I already said on my "Alanna" piece, all of my literary heroes until then had been boys - most of the girls in books simply weren't anything I felt was worth emulating. Ronja was different. With Ronja, once again, it was totally inconsequential whether she was male or female. When she is born, she is automatically assumed to be the nex...

Inktober #28: The Last Unicorn

I was eight years old when this opened in Germany. There was no way it could not be in here. XD

Sometimes, when I'm in my daughter's room, I'm amazed at how many unicorns there are in it (note: she wants it known that there are more than enough X-Wings and TARDISes there, too). They're on her bookshelves, in her Playmobil and Schleich boxes, on posters on her wall, on shirts in her wardrobe (probably to be replaced by the rainbow-farting variety by the time she turns thirteen) and in her bed, ...

Inktober originals and raffle!

I'm going to sell some of the Inktober pieces next month - two have already been claimed (Isabeau and Sam Vimes). If there are any pieces you'd like to buy before I put them up, please let me know! They'll go with a warm dark grey mat remarqued with a little drawing in white ink, and will be 105€ each for Patrons. <3 

I will also raffle off one or two Inktober pieces in about a week - I will make a selection of six or so pieces (or those not already claimed), and everyone who would l...

Inktober #27: Kylo Ren

Uploading a day early - we'll be at the Essen Games Fair tomorrow, and I don't think I'll have a chance to draw anything properly, so I've worked ahead a little!

Right, so I decided he had a space in my "heroes of page and screen". XD The new trailer makes me wonder whether there is a path back to the light for him. I'm really, really looking forward to December. <3

I had high-ish hopes for The Force Awakens. The new characters - Rey, Finn, Poe - looked nice, and I had a lot of confid...

Prompt: Ecthelion for Springsss

Here's your prompt, finally - Ecthelion of the Fountain! Water-soluble graphite and white pencil on Clairefontaine mid-tone paper. 

I got this paper yesterday and already love it! It's specifically made for mixed media, has a nice grain, and really takes water well without bending. The water-soluble pencils are perfect on it - they're really fine, so I can grope towards the right line without making a mess. 

I'm determined to take the drive that I've built up over Inktober into...

Inktober #26: Rachel Weintraub

(I'm an idiot. Thinking I wouldn't manage to finish Inktober anyway, I bought a pad with only 25 sheets of smooth paper. I need to find better paper tomorrow.) 

I read Dan Simmons' Hyperion at University, where it was actually a set text for the class I was taking (Science Fiction and Fantasy literature; of course, my termpaper was on Tolkien's language creations). Most of the other books I read for that class passed me by, but Hyperion has stayed with me ever since. I don't reme...

Éomer - Patreon commission for Krista!

Finally, here's the first commission for the September winners! Most of the other things - original work, prints and goodies - have already gone out. The calendars for Marie and Sarah are going out today, and I'll get to the Ecthelion prompt for Springsss over the next few days! 

Inktober #25: Aslan

The Narnia books have been with me for so long, and so constantly, that I can't even remember when I first read them. I must have been in primary school, and I had the first three books in German. The way they were presented probably kept me from reading the others - they had titles so confusingly similar that I can barely remember which is which (The Miracle of Narnia, The King of Narnia, A Ship from Narnia - well, that's the only one I can do), and I hated the illustrations when I was a child....

Inktober #24: Legolas

So, he finally cooperated! Part of that is due to the fact that this time, I did a structural underdrawing - a stage I often skip, leading to catastrophic anatomy. 

Legolas is my oldest recurring love. I was six when my mother read the Hobbit to me - and when we were done, I asked, That's it? Is there more?

Well, she said, well yes, there is. 

And thus, she started reading the Lord of the Rings to me when I was about seven. She skipped and shortened bits, I think, but not...

Inktober #23: Luke Skywalker

Another image more for the sake of posting something, and again a character that would have deserved better. Well. 

I got into Star Wars extraordinarily late. I grew up in a very pacifist household, and anything with "war" in the title just completely passed me by. (I'm totally aware of the fact that a lot of my childhood favourites feature violence rather heavily - Lord of the Rings, Hannibal, Watership Down, mythology, or Shaka Zulu, but I must have felt that swords, spears and teeth we...

Inktober #22: Sonmi~451

"Cloud Atlas" is probably the most unusual book in this Inktober series, and it's also the one I read most recently. 

I'd never heard of it until I read about the film coming to cinemas in 2012, and the outset - a story spanning several centuries from 1850 to the ?24th century, with a nested plot of six protagonists that are connected by these stories (the 1850 journal is read by a young musician in 1930, whose music is heard by a reporter in the 1970s, whose story is adapted into a novel...

Inktober #21: Peter Petrelli

Exactly ten years ago, TV show "Heroes" aired on German TV. I'd missed the first episode though I'd wanted to watch it - I had a newborn daughter at home and my life was pretty upside down - but a friend of mine told me about the first episode in such glowing terms that not only did I watch the second, but his summary had been so good that I actually understood what was going on. 

On Thursday, when I uploaded Newt Scamander, I had a wonderful conversation on Facebook with a visitor who po...

Inktober #20: Remus Lupin

Autumn holidays, finally! Today, I've been simply drained, and was almost resigned to skip today after two Legolases ended up ripped in the wastepaper basket. Remus really deserves better than this, but it's all I can give him today. I'm sure he'll understand. <3 

The Harry Potter books, for me, are a strange phenomenon: One of the few books I've ever loved not for any single character, but for the incredible energy they have. I can reread them every year without ever tiring of them. N...

Inktober #19: Newt Scamander

Another one that was pretty obvious, right? 

I've loved Eddie Redmayne as Newt since the very first promo pic I saw, early last year. My first connection was the Eleventh Doctor - he gave off those adorable dork vibes. And I was not to be disappointed. The entire character, plus the actor who plays him, made me fangirl rather badly. (Just after I had told myself I was getting too old to fangirl over actors. But what do I know. Adam Driver already proved me wrong the year before. Talking o...

Inktober #18: Honor Harrington

The Honor Harrington series by David Weber entered my life in 1998, after I'd read my way through all the then-available Star Wars books, and was looking for some other space opera to fill the waiting time until Episode 1. (We will forget quickly that I said that.) 

The Honor books fascinated me greatly back then. It was the first military SciFi I'd ever read, and it remained on my mind and in my sketchbooks for years. What really intrigued me was the fact that David Weber had created a u...

Inktober #17: Alanna of Trebond

Ha, nearly caught up! Maybe I'll fill in the 15th at some point. 

Alanna of Trebond was one of less than a handful of female heroines of mine when I grew up. (There just weren't many in the books I grew up with.) I must have been around twelve when I read the "Song of the Lioness" series by Tamora Pierce. Like Alanna, I was a tiny, skinny kid with short hair (and glasses), who was bullied badly because I tried to fit in with the boys (because I knew I didn't fit in with the girls, but the...

Inktober #16: Tangaloor Firefoot

Two days without or with little time for art, and while I did this one last night, I didn't even want to upload him. I'm mainly putting him up to push myself through this. 

Tangaloor Firefoot is a character from Tad Williams' novel "Tailchaser's Song", which I read when I was twelve. I've never reread it, as I've always had trouble with the sloooow beginnings in Williams' books (I never got into Memory, Sorrow and Thorn), but I really liked the cat mythology and aitiology in "Tailchaser's...

Inktober #14: Hannibal

If you've been following me for less than two and a half years, your reaction might now be: "Who? Why?!" but if you've been with me for a while, you'll now be nodding your head with an indulgent grin. Yes, I'm at it again! My favourite Carthaginian general, subject of my 2014 novel "Darkness over Cannae". My falling for him is a weird and rather illogical story. 

When I was twelve or thirteen, I watched a 1960 peplum movie with Victor Mature in an eyepatch that left out no Hollyw...

Inktober #13: King Kelson Haldane

In before midnight! Man, this has been the closest I've come yet to saying, "Nah, I'll do two tomorrow. Or maybe just one tomorrow." And don't think I haven't had this inner conversation every day for two weeks. XD

King Kelson Haldane was my poster boy when I was twenty. I'd just moved to Cologne to study, and I discovered that the bookshops and libraries in Cologne had English departments. Not English shelves with one Steven King and one Rosamunde Pilcher, but actual departments<...