“Raistlin – Time’s End” is my new digital painting. In occasion of Raistlin’s birthday, on 17 June 2026, I drew “something” about him as I did in the past years. A personal challenge, a reminder I should draw something for myself. Painted with Photoshop on Wacom Tablet and drawing app on S25 Ultra. Raistlin Majere is a character from the “Dragonlance” books by M. Weis and T. Hickman; this is a work of fanart.
What would Raistlin like for his birthday? Something everyone wishes for, when it’s time to think about it: more time. Raistlin’s character is strongly defined by his struggle for survival, from childhood to adulthood. Again and again, he gritted his teeth and sought more power, sought healing, sought immortality. As I remember those who are no longer with us, I draw Raistlin summoning the sands of time, Lord of the Past and the Present, in his desperate attempt to have more time. But the hourglass is almost empty.
My first oil painting experiments: a pair of dragons, master studies inspired by two paintings by artist Mattew Stawicki.
“Ardighiaccio” (white) 26×31 cm, oil on canvas, 15/02/2026
“Ardifiamma” (red) 26×31 cm, oil on canvas, 14/03/2026
The world has changed. As early as 2021, I began seeing the first AI image generators. That year, I also discovered that all the paintings I’d uploaded to Deviantart had been scraped and used to train the first AI models. My fight to protect human art began, a fight that has suffered many defeats on multiple fronts, especially when Artstation, Meta, and so on joined the ranks of platforms, giving all their content to the AI world. Social media makes me sad now, and I’ve lost some of the desire to publish my work on a thousand platforms: in 2023 I decided to focus on my own website, greenedera.com, and I’ve worked hard to upload my work and related works in progress, to create my own little digital home that I can furnish as I please.
I will continue to support handmade art, and although my digital art is “hand-painted,” the pollution of the digital art environment continues to grieve me. I won’t abandon digital painting—I love it too much, it’s fun, it’s powerful, it’s portable, and it’s convenient—but I’ve decided to broaden my horizons and tackle oil painting.
In the physicality of this medium, in its antiquity, I’m finding some comfort. Of course, when a photo of an oil painting exists, it too is prey to the training of AI models, but it doesn’t really matter because the piece itself is unique. Its three-dimensionality, the way the colors change depending on the light in the room, are truly beautiful. A print of a digital painting is very beautiful, but an oil painting truly has a presence in the room. Pencil is my primary drawing tool. Watercolor is delightful, but I struggle to convey the power of colors in my mind on paper. Oil, I must admit, has immense potential.
Thanks to Matt Stawicki, whose Dragonlance paintings I’ve admired for years, for posting the videos that helped me understand how to paint these dragons, and hopefully many more.
📹 Here are Matt Stawicki’s paintings I used as reference for my studies. I’ve always found them beautiful, and there’s something special about them: the artist has posted on artstation pics and videos of himself painting them, which were crucial for my learning.
I’ve learned that oil painting is complex. That getting the colors you want is a challenge in itself. That drying times teach patience. Taking a decent photo of an oil painting is tricky. And the colors don’t stay the same over time. And so many other things, along the way.
A wasted year, a journey through the fog. I had the time, but I didn’t have the mind. Emotions in turmoil, stress, and problems, and here we are, very few paintings to remember this 2025. But oh, for certain I’m not likely to forget them.
What is “art VS artist”? This excerpt from Forbes says:
“[…] In addition to helping promote artwork, #ArtvsArtist humanizes creators reminding us that artists are people too. The plethora of creative work available online can cause us to forget the people producing it. “People seem to think art accounts are just run by robots, not actual people trying to hone their craft,” concept artist, Yoshi Yoshitani says. Dehumanizing creators can encourage theft of art […]”
A painting, a final memento of a brief but meaningful journey together. During 2025, I struggled to listen to my art—I listened and heard only silence, or the call of distractions. I accepted very few requests, and only from people I cared deeply about. One of these was Anomalous Thracian, with whom I worked for three years. So many paintings, so many ideas, so many stories. It can all end so quickly. I didn’t know it, yet I was desperate to finish this painting without wasting too much time. And so this painting was finished, and just in time, you might say. Thracian loved it; he framed it and showed me a picture just before the end. I will hardly ever forget this painting. Go, Ardrael, sea elf, heroine and warrior, aboard your ship. We’ll see each other on the other side of the dawn.
“…turn the face toward you, move the faceplate from right to left, and twist the top clockwise…” Tas has become well acquainted with the workings of the time travel device. Excitement, enthusiasm, and a hint of troublemaking spirit accompany every journey. As the stones of the floor howl, an invisible wind rises and the fabric of time tears.
“Tasslehoff and the Device of Time Journeying”, is an illustration commissioned by the Dragonlance Nexus for a new upcoming edition of “Tasslehoff’s pouches of Everything”, a game manual converting Dragonlance to the 5th edition of Dragonlance.
Pencil and paper sketch + digital redraw and painting with Cintiq and Photoshop. Painted in August 2025, published in November 2025.
Tasslehoff and the Time Journeying Device are a creation of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, included in the Dragonlance books and sourcebooks. This is a work of fan art.
For any commercial use or repost of this artwork, contact me first. If you’re interested in digital downloads without watermark for personal use, licensing an artwork for a new project, or you’d like a custom print, please contact me.
Use by Fans for publication in themed Fandom groups or Fandom lore videos. I am okay with “fans” publication, as long as you use the watermarked version of the painting (we entered the era of AI and NFT theft and I already got burned, sorry), and you credit me in the post description with: “Artwork: “(Title)” Artist: “Elena Zambelli @Greenedera”. I kindly ask you to Tag me or send me a notification and insert a link to my website.
Do you appreciate my art? 🎨 Then, consider supporting my artistic journey by buying me a coffee. 💚
2024 has been a seemingly quiet year, but sprinkled with art nonetheless. I have had little energy to dedicate to posting on web and social media, so there are several finished works just sitting on my desk. There are paintings I have created for myself, others commissioned and published, some awaiting release. There are countless sketches that dot my notebooks, waiting to be developed. I am still in energy savingmode, and my good intentions for this year are to get back into gear with the creation of new paintings. And their publication 😅
Thank you, reader, for sharing this art journey with me.
Nightshade is a new tool artists can employ to disrupt AI Models. This is important – since Ai models cannot “forget” they ate copyrighted material even though the owners of said stuff ask for removal, well… let’s give the models something bad to eat. Something that will corrupt the data already inside. Guten appetit, stronzi.
“More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into “poison” samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.” (from What is nightshade, https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu)
💚 Congratulations to all the researchers and artists who worked on this tool.
This said, right now Nightshade is available only for powerful desktop devices, but soon will be available via Browser. Most interesting, in fact, is Web Glaze, allowing artists to glaze their images even if they’re unable to install Glaze.
“How can I help support Nightshade and Glaze? Thank you so much for thinking of us. It is important to us that we not only continue to provide Glaze to visual creators for free, but also extend its protective capabilities. If you or your organization may be interested in pitching in to support and advance our work, please contact our colleague Joshua Leavitt to learn more about gift opportunities for Glaze (managed by the University of Chicago campus offices).” (from FAQ,https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu)
⌛ In the picture: “Art vs artist 2023” – a way to stop and look back, take stock of a past year.
📘 A year with some noteworthy satisfactions, the publication of several publications with my illustrations: Autumn twilight, Shadow of the black rose, The journals of Kaz the Minotaur: the lost colony were released with the Dragonlance Nexus – the latter with the famous writer Richard Knaak. More illustrations for projects to be published next year.
🤝 Various private commissions, often full beautiful collaborations with people that opened for me doors to their cherised, secret worlds.
🎨 Few “personal” illustrations or in general creations – as often happens, sometimes a pencil sketch is enough for me to express what’s on my mind – and, who knows, maybe one day I’ll go back to expressing myself more.
🎭A difficult year from a health point of view, which started badly and ended badly; a year in which art was a crutch to move forward and lose myself in a world where things can go the way I want.
💻 A year in which I worked hard on my private website: a collection of my latest paintings in a place where I can take all the space I want to tell, as well as show, each painting – a private space outside of the big platforms like Deviantart and Artstation, which from my point of view they betrayed the world of artists, making all the contents available to the big AI companies when few still knew what was happening, so that Ai generated images suffocated the space meant for art created by humans.
Thank you, reader, for sharing this art journey with me.
Article written on 03/01/2024 – No unauthorized reproduction. – Elena Greenedera Zambelli #noai
🐮 Artwork reveal: Kaz the minotaur and Delbin the Kender (Dragonlance fandom) sailing their ship towards new adventure. Commissioned by the Dragonlance Nexus as internal illustration for the adventure manual “The Journals of Kaz the Minotaur – The lost colony” featuring a novel by Richard Knaak and a D&D 5th ed adventure. Other illustrations will be revealed in the next days, stay tuned!
Update, 4 new Art Process Videos mounted and uploaded. Videos that show, even in a speeded-up way, the creation of a painting… I love them. They have been influential in the past, because those created by other artists have taught me so much.
Today, I record videos for 4 reasons:
To help me focus my painting time (while recording, you can’t switch tabs and mess around)
To show that what I create is real – no “artificial intelligence etc.” Each painting is the result of many hours of work, and here you can see a part of that.
When the work is a commission, sharing the painting process with the commissioner is unique and precious for both.
Maybe there is someone, out there, for whom these videos can be useful in their journey as an artist.
Social media visibility? No. I know my videos aren’t the right kind for Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. So, often I don’t even bother to make them vertical, or short. These are full art processes, so they are horizontal and relatively long.
There are four new videos spread across the site, and also visible on my YouTube. Here they are:
An update about a painting – still trying to perfect it, to make it “just right.” This journey toward “perfection” is 22 years old: here I reveal how this same astral dragon has changed from 2001 to today.
“Draw it again!” is a personal drawing challenge that invites artists to redraw their old sketches and drawing ideas and present them side by side for comparison, showing the improvement of their skills.
2001 – Pencils
2017 – Watercolors
2023 – Digital
The original sketch, from 2001, was a practice study based on an existing painting – “Sentinel”, by Ann Marie Eastburn (1986). I was trying to understand dragon anatomy, by reproducing various existing artworks of great artists and trying my owns. I rarely used colors at the time – I could “see” my drawings in color, but I lacked the technique to color them without making a mess.
In 2017, I started painting old pencil sketches, exploring various color techniques, including watercolor and gold leaf. At the time I was trying not only to explore the world of color, but also trying to make my paintings more “textured”, to transpose the mesmerizing patterns of nature into my illustrations. This is something I still try to do today, despite the fact that I paint digitally: smooth surfaces and perfect shades aren’t for me, I like the idea that my paintings communicate an almost “tactile” sensation, as well as a visual one. I was doing experiments based on the book “Dreamscapes fantasy worlds” by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, a great expert on fantasy art, watercolor, and texture.
Since 2020, thanks to many hours spent practicing during the COVID Lockdown, I made a qualitative leap in my digital technique. In 2023, I felt confident enough to redraw the same subject and paint it. The “Dragonary challenge” called by artist Mattew Stawicki was the perfect occasion to try again with my astral dragon. After publication in January 2023, I retouched it other 2 times. And… I don’t think this journey is over yet.
A new dragon painting. As light as the soul and as incorporeal as thought, the astral dragon inhabits the intangible spheres of reality midway between the material world and that of pure energy.
🏆🎤 I’m happy to share the news: the D&D podcast “Echoes of Krynn” by Lawful Stupid RPG – whose characters I had the pleasure of illustrating – won the gold prize in the Signal Award 2023!
“The Judges voted and the Echoes of Krynn podcast is a GOLD WINNER in the Signal Awards for General-Gaming & Actual Play!” – EOK
📸🎪 Some pictures from Echoes of Krynn at the SC Comicon Jr – Greenville, Oct 29th (US) – Lovely to see the prints of my paintings on display there. In the first picture, MEDM, the Dungeon Master!
