The Greenhome
Available sizes:
11" x 14" open edition print
(Available as both the finished, color pastel work, or as a coloring book style ink outline!)
Want to purchase this artwork? Buy it directly from the artist at the following shows:
Chattacon
MidSouthCon
JordanCon
The Tennessee Renaissance Festival
LibertyCon
GenCon
Dragon*Con
Ohio Renaissance Festival
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About the Pieces:
The very first original piece of art completed for Michael's Sagaborn Roleplaying system, The Greenhome, it serves as a great example of how writing and the art that illustrates that writing can be misaligned, by the smallest of details. I think that the way Michael and I work on art for Sagaborn, as described in The Mage Tower of Eredar's description, was born out of some of the mistakes that I made when working on this piece.
Michael asked me to illustrate the forested home of Kaelnor for his first Sagaborn book. I envisioned a blending of Rivendell and Lothlorien from The Lord of the Rings. I wanted to take the impossibly sized trees of Lothlorien, and blend that with the fanciful, and delicate architecture of Rivendell. I submitted my sketches, got them approved, and finished the art.
Later that year at Dragon*Con, I was flipping through the book that the art was published in, and came across a "letter" in the book, written long ago by a druid who visited The Greenhome. I looked over at my brother and asked if the druid had a problem with his eyesight, or maybe a bad memory, cause what he wrote in his letter looked nothing like what I illustrated. Because the writing and the art were created simultaneously, if either the artist (me) or the writer thought of something neat or clever to add in, it impacted the other. But neither of us realized it at the time!
From this issue arose a cool concept for making art for Sagaborn. Rather than Michael giving me a description to base my art on, I am given a very loose premise, which then after the art is complete, are those scenes described in writing. It makes me as the artist look like I truly nailed the illustration of a particular scene.
This piece also helped me realize a very useful technique when working in pastel. The Greenhome started as a pencil drawing, about 6 inches tall. I took that sketch, scanned it into the computer, and then had it printed in a faint blue on a full size sheet of paper. I then refined the lines in pencil, rescanned it, and printed it a second time. I then worked on the piece in ink, making sure the lines were exactly where they needed to be, and repeat. The finished pastel drawing has a faint blue print of the ink drawing underneath it. Some would say that is "cheating," but I know plenty of artists that have clear gessoed directly over their pencil drawings, and painted an oil painting directly onto that outline. So it is not cheating, it is using your resources.
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About the Artist:
Paul and his brother Michael opened Aradani Studios in 2002, selling both their artwork and costuming as they travelled all across the US. Paul’s medium of choice is charcoal, a passion he discovered in college. He loves the fluidity of it, the ease of moving it across the page with a simple gesture, and on the flipside, the challenge of it, such a simple gesture can also erase hours of painstaking detail. Paul’s work has won numerous awards around the country, including the prestigious Chesley Award in 2006, for Best Monochrome Unpublished for his piece Nightmare. He currently resides in Nashville, TN, where he, his brother, and sister continue to expand and build their elf ear empire. You can see his artwork at http://paulbielaczyc.com/.
