Trials of Dungbar
This is different from my other paintings🙂 I’m still putting pieces together of everything I like and find beautiful in TV shows, movies, others’ work, or my own.
Some say it’s better to specialize and do pretty much the same thing in every piece—but I have difficulty doing this and always want to try something else. I think, by searching for different ways, I will someday develop my own style—something I like to paint, something that is fun and inspires me.
At the beginning of last year (2025), I set myself two unresolved problems to answer by the year’s end. These would be:
1. Find out what my inclinations are, and
2. Why I want to paint (in general).
The result is:
1. I think the most important realization I had is that I love line art. I like the backgrounds of some animated TV shows like Disenchantment 🙊.
In the process, the lines help me stay focused and not change some shapes again and again. You can see this clearly in the process of Boro, Goblin of the Mountain and Step Into Unknown, where I had a failed painterly approach for rocks, stalactites, and mountains. From now on, I allow myself to use lines in my process, and perhaps as an artistic choice, letting them stay in the end result.
Something that has also been a recurring theme in my head is geometric shapes, symbols, and puzzles—I would like to incorporate these more meaningfully into my pieces.
And lastly, I’ll stick to landscape painting, but it will look different in the future than it has so far and will practically always contain a monument, an artifact, or a creature.
2. My motivation for doing all this effort practically for free is, in the first place, because I want to get better at it so that I can use my paintings or my skills for actual things like a graphic novel. Or, for example, it would be nice if someone hired me to design a book cover someday. Thanks to my musician husband, I already have the opportunity to do paintings for his music projects.❤️
Deep within me, I also like to express myself, but I haven’t really done that yet. That’s also an insight and something to move forward with. Sandro told me to look inside myself and do what I feel compelled to do. Somehow, I feel such paintings would no longer look as colorful as the paintings I have done so far, and even those (up until now) take place at sunset or at night. It’s funny that I use so many colors and am bad at applying them, but in my head, some images are generally dark and have far fewer colors in them. I think I have a very colorful filter.
Okay, back to the painting above called Trials of Dungbar. I reeeaally had fun painting this! 😍 I just drew something random, and it came out like this—really. If you want to listen to the corresponding music and watch the process in the meantime, here is a video on YouTube:
To download this painting for free in full resolution, follow this link to the collection: