New: Raistlin – tea and books

Check β€œRaistlin, tea and books” , my new digital painting. The perfect day a solitary mage could imagine: tea, books and a nice time reading.

Several other paintings are brewing up, news about them will come in the next weeks!


Work in progress


β€œRaistlin, tea and books” is my new digital painting. In occasion of Raistlin’s birthday, on 17 June 2024, I drew β€œsomething” about him as I did in the past 3 years. A personal challenge, a reminder I should draw something for myself.
Raistlin Majere is a character from the β€œDragonlance” books by M. Weis and T. Hickman, this is a work of fanart.

Raistlin’s β€œday of life” is often the occasion of weird ideas from his friends – like surprise parties for him and his twin, silly and embarassing gifts he has no use for. So we should ask, what would the perfect birthday gift be? The answer is: a quiet day. A quiet day of tea and books.
Perhaps holed up in Lemuel’s house, like a friend suggested.

Article written on 17/06/2024 – Elena Greenedera Zambelli #noai

New: Sithtillaxx the dragon

Artwork reveal: digital painting of Sithtillaxx, a very ancient copper dragon in the Dragonlance fandom.

Check the artwork page!

β€œThe coppers have a proud ancestry, dating back to the matriarch Querrasian. The offspring of her first eggs included Blayze and Hyaniss, who mated to create the eggs of the next generation. The survivors of that clutch were Tharn and Sithtillaxx who, upon their flight from the grotto, grew to maturity and survived to become the procenitors of all copper dragons living today.” (from the Fift Age Dragons – manual)

05/04/2024, Elena Zambelli #noai

New: Lilith the librarian & Basalt Fireforge

Digital paintings of of Lilith Hallmark, Aesthetic and librarian from Solamnia, and Basalt Fireforge, hill dwarf and nephew of Flint in the Dragonlance fandom. Created as an internal illustrations for the game manual “Untold Quests” [coming soon on Dungeon Master Guild].

Lilith Hallmark had the honor of leading the recovery expedition to the library of Tarsis after its destruction. She cataloged and rearranged books and scrolls, and became one of the most influential aesthetics after Bertrem.

Basalt Fireforge is the nephew of the more famous Flint Fireforge, character of the Dragonlance books by M. Weis and T. Hickman. A neidar (hill dwarf) born in Hillhome. Trained as a smith, after much personal growth and adventures he became the Major of Hillhome and innkeeper.


This paintings will be interior art for an upcoming manual:

Untold quests: a new game manual by the Dragonlance Nexus for playing Dragonlance in Dnd5.

More info: coming soon!

Support my work by supporting the Dragonlance Nexus on Patreon


Artworks in this project:

Created on: 18/02/2024 Copyright 2024 Elena Greenedera Zambelli, all rights reserved #noai

Artwork reveal: Kitiara, Champions of Krynn

πŸ—‘πŸ² Finally I can share a painting I was keeping under cover: “Kitiara Uth Matar and Myrtani the Aurak” – Dragonlance Fandom. The war is lost, the battlefield a disaster. Kitiara, dragonlord of the blue army, is giving a killing stare to her ally Myrtani the Aurak, currently ranting about the recent disaster. Commissioned as cover art for the upcoming DnD 5 manual by the Dragonlance Nexus β€œChampions of Krynn”

✨ Link to the artwork page

More on the artwork page;

Kitiara Uth Matar – Champions of Krynn

My new painting for the Dragonlance Nexus! The war is lost, and Kitiara Uth Matar is not happy. The fact Myrtani the Aurak is there, ranting and complaining about his new orders, doesn’t improve the situation. Commissioned as cover art for the upcoming DnD 5 manual by the Dragonlance Nexus “Champions of Krynn” – available…

Β© 2023 Elena Greenedera Zambelli “Kitiara Uth Matar – Champions of Krynn” , all rights reserved #noai

New artwork: Big Bad Mushroom Dragon

πŸ„πŸ„ 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, final…

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

New artwork: Sturm Brightblade

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

✨ 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 Sturm’s eardrums, filling his head with pain. […] Sturm’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)

πŸ’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 – 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. 🎨🐲

This is now the third year I have participated in Matt Stawicki’s ”Dragonary challenge”, an opportunity to spend a month drawing dragons.
β€œBut couldn’t you draw them any time of the year?” 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 – No unauthorized reproduction. – Elena Greenedera Zambelli #noai

A summary for a 2023 of art

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

πŸ“˜ 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.

πŸ’» 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.

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.

β€œDraw 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 – β€œSentinel”, 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.

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 β€œAstral aurora dragon” 2023 Elena Greenedera Zambelli, all rights reserved #noai

Award-winning podcast: Echoes of Krynn

πŸ†πŸŽ€ 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?

πŸ“ΈπŸŽͺ 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