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 inconseq...

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 (pro...

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 - ...

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...

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 witho...

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 othe...

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 ...

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 ...

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, Hanni...

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 mu...

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 Thursd...

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, ...

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 fan...

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...

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 b...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Inktober #12: Jon Snow

You knew he was coming, of course! 

I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire (which I insist on calling it even though GoT has long become a staple of mainstream culture) in 2003, and somehow had the incredible luck to latch on to one of the few characters who, by now, have neither died (permanently) nor raped anyone, which is a frigging accomplishment for that series. 

The funny...

Inktober #11: Shaka Zulu

That Friday evening in late October, 1986, was remarkable for several reasons. My family had got its first ever microwave. I'd come home crying because I'd been stung on the earlobe by a bee. And the first episode of the BBC series "Shaka Zulu" was on ZDF. 

I probably didn't understand much of it. It was a lot of politics, my ear hurt like no man's business, and everybody was taking turns c...

Inktober #10: Commander Vimes

Just a very quick one today - I was torn between doing two better ones tomorrow, or skipping today, and in the end I decided to go through with this. 

Commander Sam Vimes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It took me a long time to pick up Discworld. I'd made the mistake of getting the first book in German, and the translation felt to me so cumbersome and laboured that I couldn't get ...

Inktober #9: That bunny film

In 1986 around Easter, I was staying with a friend overnight. Her mother had taken out a few videos for us, asking us to watch "that bunny film" with my friend's younger siblings. 

The siblings were something like three and five. We decided we'd not tell them about the videos at all, but send them to bed. We almost didn't watch the "bunny film". We were eleven years old, far too old for car...

Inktober #8: The Brothers Lionheart

Probably my favourite book from my childhood is Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart. I still can't do scary dragons. Which is a particular tragedy here because Katla in the book is so scary that I'd carefully skip the pages with her on them. 

I didn't really do it justice, and under normal circumstances, I'd scrap it or do it tomorrow, but this is Inktober, which is all about posting e...

Inktober #7: "Only each other at the last"

In the early nineties, I took out a book called "The Darkest Road" from the town library. It had an incredible cover by John Howe and the author, the blurb said, had helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion. This had to be good. 

What I failed to see was the little red "3" on the front, and it was only when I started reading that I realised this was the third book of a trilogy. The ...

Inktober #6: Fingon

The first of the Silmarillion themed days! As you can imagine, the Sil gets more than one day of October. I was torn between doing Finrod and Fingon (apart from the obvious others) and this one actually started out as Finrod, but subtly turned into Fingon as I drew. Which I was fine with. 

Coming up tomorrow: Something from a Fantasy trilogy so obscure that I barely found anything online to...

Inktober #5: Atréju and Fuchur

The Neverending Story was the first loooong book I remember my mother reading to me (and always breaking off at the most exciting passages, which made sure I'd read the next chapter or two on my own). I loved the book, the illustrations, the old German writing for the chapter headings. I was madly in love with Atréju. I reread it a few times since then, always discovering more about it and being ...

Inktober #4: Isabeau d'Anjou

On with my heroes of page and screen! This is Isabeau, also known as Ladyhawke, from the 80's film of the same name. A little jewel, if you're willing to cut the music from Alan Parsons Project some slack. XD Apart from that, it's aged extremely well. Wonderful cast with Matthew Broderick, and Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer as the cursed lovers who can never see each other, as he turns into a ...

Inktober #3: Dietrich von Bern

Wooo-hooo! Ballpoint pen proved to be exactly the game changer I'd hoped it would be when someone suggested it last night. 

There's something I've noticed about making art: My brain goes into certain media modes. When I think of myself inking, my brain immediately toggles "awkward anatomy", "contrast gone wrong" and "to hell with detail". When I thought about doing the next pieces in ballpo...

Inktober 2: Richard III

Because it's his 565th birthday and I'm marking exams about Shakespeare's version. 

Acrylic ink, Micron Pigma and white gel pen. And oh my God, my inking is as bad as I remember it. I'll have to find some twist to that inking thing if I'm to survive this month.