New artwork: Big Bad Mushroom Dragon

๐Ÿ„๐Ÿ„ I’m excited to show my new painting of the Big Bad Mushroom Dragon. From pencil sketch to digital painting using cintiq and Photoshop: finally, a personal work.


Work in progress


Artwork page

Wips, details, prints and more

Big Bad Mushroom Dragon

My new painting of the Big Bad Mushroom Dragon. From pencil sketch to digital painting using cintiq and Photoshop. Personal work. Work in progress Is this a series? Perhaps This is the second of my mushroom dragons, a Very Responsible Adult. The first instead was the baby version: Details Video Art process video: recorded, finalโ€ฆ

Artwork created on: 23/02/2024 – article 27/02/2024 Copyright 2024 Elena Greenedera Zambelli, all rights reserved #noai

New artwork: Sturm Brightblade

โœจ๐ŸŽจ “Sturm Brightblade – The last stand” – A new fanart dedicated to the Dragonlance books, commissioned by A.B.

โœจ Link to the artwork page

“For a moment the sun-drenched sky was empty, then the dragon burst up over the edge of the wall, its horrifying scream splitting Sturmโ€™s eardrums, filling his head with pain. […] Sturmโ€™s sun shattered.” (From Dragon of winter night, Ch. 13. M. Weis & T. Hickman.)

I was asked to create a painting dedicated to Sturm’s last moments. Well, “that moment”, the one in which Sturm sacrifices himself to challenge a dragon and his rider alone, in order to gain precious seconds that will allow his companions to win the battle of the High Clerist Tower.
This moment has already been represented by the great Dragonlance painters and by many fanartists. I chose, in agreement with the client, a particular point of view. This is a close-up of Sturm as he is about to strike at his enemy. It is “that moment” of great courage, where the knight is literally staring his own death in his eyes, yet he challenges and conquers his own fear for the greater good.
The point of view of the painting is that of the blue dragon, Skie, who is about to glide over Sturm so that Kitiara can deal a killing blow.
The books talk about the blinding rays of the sun profiling the dragon and dragonlord, whose shadow is cast over the tower behind Sturm. For the rest, I chose a milder color scheme, which could coordinate with another great painting, Larry Elmore’s representation of Sturm’s death. My artwork seeks to be a “prequel” to that moment, that great painting, forever in the hearts of all Dragonlance fans.

“The last stand” – Copyright 2024 Elena Greenedera Zambelli, all rights reserved #noai

Nightshade, a tool against AI scraping

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)

๐Ÿ’š 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)

Other than this, please support the project by following it on:
X/Twitter: @TheGlazeProject IG: theglazeproject

Article written on 12/02/2024 โ€“ Elena Greenedera Zambelli #noai

New paintings: “dragonary 2024”

The year started with 7 new dragons! Check each of them on my website by clicking this article. ๐ŸŽจ๐Ÿฒ

This is now the third year I have participated in Matt Stawicki’sโ€‚”Dragonary challenge”, an opportunity to spend a month drawing dragons.
โ€œBut couldn’t you draw them any time of the year?โ€ you might ask me.
Yes, and sometimes I do, but other times a kick in the butt (in this case, the decision to commit to the challenge) is what is needed to overcome laziness, distraction, or having a thousand new ideas and then not following them through. Or artblock.

Last year I found the strength to draw 31 new dragons (really, I don’t know how I did it), but this year I decided to focus on 7, thus dedicating a little time every day to the four main phases of creating my paintings: 1) sketch 2) lineart 3) creation of flat shapes 4) painting and rendering. Specifically, since there were no prompts from Matt Stawicki this year, I used this opportunity to “draw again” some of my (very) old dragon sketches. Comparing the old and the new gave me a lot of satisfaction.

Forcing myself to draw these seven dragons helped me restart after a period of (more or less forced) break from painting. In the meantime I have started working on several new projects again, which I hope to share soon.

Click on each dragon to discover more:

More:

One of the “extra projects” that I love the most is an expansion and retouching work for a dragon created last year, and that I love very much: the Grumpy sentinel now has a horizontal format, perfect as a desktop wallpaper, and a finishing softer for rendering lights.

Article written on 03/01/2024 โ€“ No unauthorized reproduction. โ€“ Elena Greenedera Zambelli #noai

A summary for a 2023 of art

โŒ› In the picture: “Art vs artist 2023” – a way to stop and look back, take stock of a past year.

๐Ÿ“˜ 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.

๐Ÿค Various private commissions, often full beautiful collaborations with people that opened for me doors to their cherised, secret worlds.

๐ŸŽจ 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.

๐ŸŽญA 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.

๐Ÿ’ป 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.

New: Kaz the minotaur โ€“ Dragonlance Nexus

๐Ÿฎ 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 โ€œThe Journals of Kaz the Minotaur โ€“ The lost colonyโ€ featuring a novel by Richard Knaak and a D&D 5th ed adventure. Other illustrations will be revealed in the next days, stay tuned!

๐ŸŽจ Click here for info about the manual

Check the 6 paintings of this series

15 december 2023, Elena Zambelli – #noai

More art process videos

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:

  1. To help me focus my painting time (while recording, you can’t switch tabs and mess around)
  2. 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.
  3. When the work is a commission, sharing the painting process with the commissioner is unique and precious for both.
  4. 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:

1 – Daphne and Levi – 1 minute

See artwork page

2 – Unexpected encounter – 1 minute

See artwork page

3 – Legend of a sacrifice, complete process (2 minutes)

See artwork page

4 – Drow and furbolg (2 minutes)

See artwork page


Article: 16/11/2023 – Copyright 2023 Elena Greenedera Zambelli, all rights reserved #noai

Artwork update: Astral dragon

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.

โ€œDraw it again!โ€ 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 – โ€œSentinelโ€, 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. Andโ€ฆ I don’t think this journey is over yet.

Full artwork page:

Astral aurora dragon

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.

Keep reading

Copyright โ€œAstral aurora dragonโ€ 2023 Elena Greenedera Zambelli, all rights reserved #noai

Award-winning podcast: Echoes of Krynn

๐Ÿ†๐ŸŽค 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


How about prints?

๐Ÿ“ธ๐ŸŽช 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!


Artwork page:

Article: 2023, Elena “Greenedera” Zambelli