There are photos from my latest watercolour workshop online on my blog! [link]

Participants were:




A few of the works that were made at the workshop:

The lovely *abasss from has published an interview with me in their blog "AquaTalk". It was loads of fun to do and you can find it here: [link]

I'm feeling like doing one or two Tolkien commishs, so if you're interested, please take a look at my rates and the formats I offer [link] and drop me a mail to jenny (at)goldseven.de!

Tolkien only at this time, please, though I might extend that to Harry Potter or Song of Ice and Fire.

Edit: All slots taken, thank you!

I've got a free slot for one more person at my watercolour workshop on 27th/28th of August! If you're interested, please drop me a mail at jenny(at)goldseven.de !

Info on the workshop in this journal: [link]

I'd like to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to all who swamped my inbox with the faves and comments yesterday for the Daily Deviation on "The Sword and the Harp"! It wasn't my first, but I know that this particular piece was probably the most deserving of the lot. A lot more than the Marauders, certainly.

Please forgive me if I don't reply to all of you who left your congratulations - or to all the nice comments on the "Jon Snow" pic and the photo of me (which garnered a lot of rather flattering compliments - thank you so much for those as well), which were completely lost under the pile of new messages. I'm completely swamped with school work at the moment and heavy-heartedly cleared my inbox of most of the comments today that didn't ask a direct question. But I've read them all and they're so appreciated!

(And they were a welcome excuse to break away from my marking class tests yesterday...  who wants to read shaky analyses of newspaper articles written in even shakier English if you just have to hit "refresh" for a new slew of comments saying how awesome you are? See. That's how I spent my Tuesday.)

Thank you all so much!

Yesterday, I rediscovered a blogspot address that I'd set up way back in 2009. I'd never done anything with it, though I wanted to. (2009 was a hard time for art, I remember.)

At the same time, I found myself getting more and more exasperated by Facebook. I was getting too many FB invitations from people who'd just have added me to their four hundred twenty-six other friends (and I, them, to my eighty-three). I was getting too many invitations to events that everybody who knows me knew I would not be able to get to anyway. I reconnected with people I hadn't seen in ten, even twenty years, and at first I thought, Whoo! We've reconnected! No, we haven't. We've been congealed in each other's facebook collection. Hundreds of colourful little icons you don't care about.

So I hit "deactivate account". And was assaulted by a clever assortment of FB friends' icons telling me: "We'll miss you!" No, you won't. You seriously won't. You either see me every week, or you won't even notice my icon is gone from your collection of four hundred. My cursor hovered over the "Yes, deactivate" for no longer than five seconds. Which is a damn short time for something so many people can't seem to live without.

If anyone'd like to follow me on Blogger, here's the address:

[link]

I'll be posting sketches and works in progress there, and ramble about the art creation process and such lovely things. The things people never read when they show up in the dA artists comments. So, if you're interested, wander over, have a cup of tea, and enjoy!

If you add me on blogspot, maybe you could let me know (if I know you on dA) what your blogger identity is, so can link the two personalities despite my very limited powers of retention?

OMG, over a hundred replies? Thank you all so much for your input. It'll take me a while to get through all you've written, but it's all so very much appreciated! The general tenor seems to be "it depends", with a lot of you feeling that what's being portrayed is cliché - but the sort of cliché that happens quite often anyway.

The funny thing about your replies is that so many of you are not in the cliché category because we all here, for the most part, are/have been the guys and girls sitting way away from the hubbub with a Fantasy book in their hands or a drawing pad on their lap.

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Hey guys, I'd love some input, mainly from those of you who live in the US and are still at school, or have gone to school until very recently.

I'm currently reading "Thirteen Reasons Why" by Jay Asher with my Year Nine. [link] It was the students' idea and thus far, it's pretty good to work with in class. Now I had one boy posing a question that I honestly couldn't answer, and that's where I hope you come in.

Brief synopsis, although I hope some of you might know it: A High School student named Clay is sent a shoebox full of audiotapes. There's no address, and when he starts listening, he realises that they were recorded by Hannah Baker, a classmate who killed herself two weeks previously. On thirteen sides of the tapes, she addresses the thirteen people who were responsible for her suicide, through those sorts of little actions that all teenagers do, never think about, and which, accumulated, drove Hannah to swallowing pills.

Now this student of mine said that he didn't like the book because it was too cliché. Teenagers being concerned mostly with initiating, avoiding, bragging about, or having sex, parties, working on their breakdown cars and sitting in diners. (To clarify, it was *not* the suicide theme he thought was handled in a stereotypical way, but the way in which everyday life of U. S. teenagers was being portrayed.)

I could neither say yes nor no, because my image of America, obviously, was obtained in the same way as most of the world's image of America: Through Hollywood. If you take that as a basis, the book definitely fits in with all those teenie romance movies that I never watched because I always felt having seen one was enough to know them all. How accurate is that image? The most useful answers would be from those who've actually read the book and know the nuances, which of course I can't bring across in the short synopsis here.

In Germany, I've always felt that teenagers think they have to live up to what Hollywood tells them to be like. The girls think unless they look like the cheerleaders in the soaps, they're fat and ugly. They all think if you haven't had sex before the age of fifteen, there's something seriously wrong with you. I know it wasn't that bad when I was a teenager, though that was about twenty years ago (and the Hollywoodesque expectations of life were there, but they were so incredibly far removed from my own reality that dreaming about Hannibal or Legolas was *way* more realistic). The dating didn't really begin until you were sixteen or seventeen, and then the ones who *were* seen dating (and who were usually very much in-your-face about it) were quickly termed the class's more undesirable members. And if anything beyond kissing happened before you were seventeen or so, we would have been scandalised if we'd found out. I *was* scandalised when I saw, in Year Ten, that one (!) of my classmates wore make-up. Okay, it was the eighties. Being dressed in neon-coloured potato sacks and too-short, bleached, baggy jeans probably didn't help there. Today, the eleven-year old girls dress in things that I didn't dare to touch before I was twenty-five, and wear make-up from Year Eight onwards.

So, what's it like at US schools? Does "Thirteen Reasons Why" portray the reality? (Quite apart from the fact, by the way, that the plot of the book is highly contrived and unlikely to happen like this; still makes for a great read.)

For this month's feature, I've picked art pieces I've stumbled over in the last few weeks and that deserve ten times the attention they've got so far, for their outstanding technique, pure inspiration, or great vision. Take a peek at all the goodness, and get armfuls of inspiration along the way!


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Fantastic pencil work. I adore realistic pencils that don't look like black-and-white photography but still show the strokes. And I love it most when it's unfinished.

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I just love Emla's work. She's got a new series up of "Bottled things" - take a look; it's ingenious!

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Wonderful take on Art Nouveau, look at those colours!

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Another one with gorgeous colours - so dreamy!

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This. This is easily the most disturbing thing I've seen all week. In a good way, of course!

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... so after the angler giraffe, back to some less disturbing animals.

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The watercolour technique here blows me away. So light, so effortless-looking.

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The details in this one are beautiful, as well as the storytelling in it.

Hope you like them as much as I do!

Five easy ways to tell you’re a homophobe!

1. You disown your son when he tells you he’s gay. CHECK!
2. You refer to homosexuals as fags, fairies, or with other unsavoury F-words. CHECK!
3. You find yourself ripping up rainbow-coloured flags in your free time. CHECK!
4. You stop voting for the German Liberal Party even after Guido Westerwelle’s resignation. CHECK!
5. You upload a picture of two Elves from the Tolkien legendarium and say they’re not gay. CHECK!

… Now wait a minute.

It’s incredible how narrow-minded people can become if you dare to say such politically incorrect things as “These characters are not gay”.

I can only imagine that some of the ones who accused me of homophobia in comments and PNs after the image I uploaded last week* were gay themselves and have been subjected to all sorts of homophobia for so long that they jump at anyone’s throat for the slightest hint of what they perceive as intolerance. And I can imagine it very well indeed. I have gay friends, very close friends too, and I’ve seen first-hand what intolerant people can do to the ones they don’t tolerate.

What those people don’t get is that there’s nothing homophobic about stating that characters that were clearly never intended to be gay by their authors are… well, not gay. And please, don’t give me all that “Tolkien was just a downtrodden Catholic boy who would have written steamy sex scenes between all the guys in his novels if conventions had permitted.” No. Just no.

I suppose you’re getting too old for this community if you find that 96% of it revolves around sex – because the average deviant is between 16 and 20 years of age and that’s what those people’s minds revolve around a lot more frequently than older people’s minds. Which isn’t supposed to say that I don’t appreciate well-written erotica (loads of it on this site though you have to search for it), or well-drawn sex scenes, whether straight or gay. There’s a lot of beautiful and sexy stuff around – of the artists’ original characters, or of loads of fandom characters who actually are gay.

I don’t mind sex, heaven forefend. I’ve had lots of it. And that’s probably the reason why I don’t have to think about it non-stop while reading Tolkien, or Harry Potter, or watching Heroes, or eating cheesecake. I don’t care if it’s excessive boy-on-boy, girl-on-boy, two-girls-on-boy, unicorn-on-zebra or archenemy-on-archenemy. It wearies me.

And I would never dream of prescribing you what to think. If I come across slash I don’t support – again, regardless whether it’s excessive boy-on-boy, girl-on-boy, two-girls-on-boy, unicorn-on-zebra or archenemy-on-archenemy – I’ll usually hold my tongue. But I don’t want it shoved in my face in my own gallery, when I’ve uploaded a picture with no sexual content at all, and say so in the description (and it’s sad that these things even have to be said in descriptions).

On that note, I suppose I can count myself incredibly lucky for having found such wonderful, mature, and insightful people here on dA that I can chat with. Given that quite a few of my pics have made the front page, I suppose that it borders on a miracle that I’m getting relatively little batshit. But all the good vibes that I get in my gallery do make the bits of batshit stand out all the more.

So what is this post? It’s a bit of a rant. It’s a bit of an explanation. It’s something I’ll link the next person to who thinks they absolutely have to accuse me of homophobia. Feel free to accuse me of being literal-minded for insisting on canon. I’ll freely tell you that I am.

And while we’re on it, why not be more creative? Why accuse me of homophobia for drawing two straight guys when you can just as well accuse me of racism for drawing a white-skinned figure, or of arachnophobia because I’m drawing a horse? Or, come to that, of anti-lefthandedness because I draw all my Tolkien Elves right-handed though I'm left-handed myself?

Just a thought.

Could anyone help me bounce off some ideas for Silmarillion paintings? I should add the restriction that I'm totally on a Maedhros trip, specifically with Fingon, though it doesn't have to be.

I have too many ideas and totally can't decide what I want to do. Help?

First idea would be revisiting this one. I've always wanted to finish it and never got it it. I'd probably redo it from scratch though.

Then there's that scene in [link] with Maedhros having to write with his left hand. Also worth revisiting.

Ages ago, I did a pic of Maedhros and Fingon practising swordplay after Maedhros' loss of his hand that I#d also like to redo. Nice excuse for Elves stripped to the waist. *

Any other ideas for Maedhros with or without Fingon?


*NO slash comments, please.

So, it’s definite! My next watercolour workshop will take place on August 27/28 in Aachen, at the Youth Hostel.

UPDATE: All twelve slots are taken.* BUT! If you're still interested, keep the emails coming! There's been so muc interest this year that I may offer a second weekend (which would favour those who would have liked to come but couldn't on that particular weekend). I have twelve people together; if I got something like twenty, I could split them into two workshops. I'd announce a second date as soon as it was definite.

So if you're interested, please let me know, and you'll go on the waiting list for Workshop Two!

*There are a few who have given me something like a 80% yes - don't worry, you're included!



The  details:

WHEN: August 27th/28th (weekend), 10.00 to 18.00

WHERE: Aachen Youth Hostel. [link] I’ve held the last two workshops there and it’s ideal.

HOW MUCH: 60 Euros per participant. The workshop fee covers only the workshop, not your accommodation or journey! Prices for staying at the Youth Hostel can be seen in the link above. I’d book lunch for Sunday, maybe a snack on Saturday, and on Saturday evening, we’d hit Aachen’s very nice early night life. (I’m too old for the actual night life, but feel free to extend the night. XD)

WHO: Anyone who reasonably thinks I can still teach them something about watercolour. It seems we have several people who have already attended one of my workshops, which means I’ll make sure there’s useful content for all skill levels. Total beginners are very welcome, as are non-German speakers. I held the last workshops mostly in English, but either English or German is a must (since that’s all I can speak).

HOW MANY: There’s a limit of twelve participants! So be sure to throw in your lot early! The last workshops were completely full. I’ll keep this journal updated for how many free places there are.  

HOW TO: Send me an email to jenny(at)goldseven.de if you’re definitely interested. You don’t have to pay for the workshop straight away, but be prepared to do so during the next month, as I’d like to have the expenses covered for when I book the room. In your mail, I’d like to know something about your experience level with watercolour and/or what specifically you’re interested in learning.

Hey guys, I’ve received a couple of requests and I’d like to know if anyone would be interested in another watercolour workshop this year?

Some (tentative) details:

WHEN: August 27th/28th; one weekend (may change)
WHERE: Either Aachen or Jülich, in any case Western Germany. (This is not negotiable, I'm afraid. )
HOW MUCH: Around 50-60 Euros per participant, depends on what sort room I’ll find. The workshop fee covers only the workshop, not your accommodation or journey!
WHO: Anyone who reasonably thinks I can still teach them something about watercolour. It seems we have several people who have already attended one of my workshops, which means I’ll make sure there’s useful content for all skill levels. Total beginners are very welcome, as are non-German speakers. I held the last workshops mostly in English, but either English or German is a must.

As of now, I’m just sounding out interest, so nothing’s fixed. Just reply here if you’re interested or would like to know more!

Let's go for some funny stuff in today's feature!  Hope I can bring a smile or two to your face. Enjoy, and don't forget to visit those awesome and funny people!



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Hey guys, there's a contest running at and I'm donating prizes. ^^ Check it out! The topic is "Mystery". [link]


Secondly, I've discovered so much absolutely fantastic stuff lately around dA that I'd like to give you a little sample of it. I've decided against a huge dump of these gems, such as not to drown the individual pieces, so I'll just spread them out over the next months. Drop by those gorgous artists and spread some love! This one's rather heavy on the watercolour side of things.


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And last but not least, a stubbled Aedan!
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Hey guys, I'll be on tonight's Critique Night from [link] along with , to answer questions. Not sure what awaits me tonight, but I'm looking forward to it! Pop in at [link] and find out, too!

I've also finally, finally bought myself a new computer. You know I'm still working with the old Photoshop 6.0, but my workflow usually looked like this: click - wait... wait... wait... reaction. Paint a line... wait... wait... paint another line. Save image... wait... wait... wait... get myself some new Pepsi... come back... wait... wait... you get the idea.

Now this thing is so damn fast that I feel almost rushed! I'm not used to something happening as soon as I click! That's weird. My old comp had 1 GB RAM. Now I'm running (literally!) on 6 GB and it's mind-blowing.

The school term is pretty much over as well, and I can finally finish that Tolkien commission! I knew I was going to need a new comp for it too - the lineart file was already so huge that it was impossible to work with. Putting the watercolours together would probably have finished it off, and I wasn't keen on that.

Hi all,

A very Happy New Year to you! If you don't see a lot of me in the first weeks of the new year, I'm - again - over my head in work. At least part of that work, however, is that Tolkien picture I posted a preview shot of. There are one or two pics I might finish on the side... most of which have already gathered virtual dust from waiting patiently on my hard drive in scribble form... O_o

Other commissions are still closed for the time being - I might open them up again in spring, after that Tolkien one is done.

And here's a little plug again for my Rhyddion Chronicles calendars - three of them are left lying around in my study... come on guys, it'd be a shame for them to go in the shredder.
***EDIT: Two left***


This is what the calendar looks like:



How to order:

The price for the calendar is 18 Euros, plus 7 Euros shipping. No matter where to. As of 1st January, 2011. Thank you so much, Deutsche Post. <_<

Payment can be made via PayPal (jenny-at-goldseven.de)
or, if you're in Germany, bank transfer (Überweisung).

If you're not sure how much that is in your currency, check xe.com!

If you'd like to purchase a calendar, send me an e-mail (jenny-at-goldseven.de) with the subject "Calendar+Your Name". The calendar will go on its way as soon as possible (payment in advance, please). Give me your exact address in the email, thus, it's easier for me to keep track. If your (and your postman's) native tongue is not English, German or Spanish, let me know what "do not bend" is in your language, to forestall any accidents to your calendar along the way.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Would you believe I spent all day uploading pics for the calendar, fiddling with layout and everything... and then realised that the Calendar would be in German??

Gah. Since I can't find another print service with English months and days of the week, I'll stick with this one and hope it won't deter too many. To make up for that, the calendar will now definitely be A3 size and it looks *really* cool. I'll be back with pics shortly.


Secondly, I'll be at the Essen Cames Con (Spielemesse Essen) from Friday afternoon to Sunday next weekend. If you're in the area, wander by the artist alley.

So, back from two thrilling days of fun, learning and inspiration! Last weekend, we met in Aachen for the watercolour workshop I held there for the second time (and very probably not the last).


were all part of the gang, completed by Spong, Antia, jody-claire, foxx, Corinna and taps from comicforum.de.

That was an extremely cool mix - KoShiatar and Saito20 are from Italy and Spain, respectively, so we all ended up talking English for most of the time. Apart from the times most of us lapsed back to our native German - sorry for that, you two, and thanks to Foxx, who usually was the one to get us back on track, linguistically.

The areas covered were, of course, watercolour basic techniques and tips, folds, picture composition, contrast, some colour theory, and the lesser known areas of expertise such as "Happy little accidents are rarely happy" or "Green is overrated", as well as "Brussels sprouts happen". Particularly in watercolour.

Here are some of the results (loads more since last time!)


by Foxx: [link] Another coloured by Foxx, inks by me: [link]
by taps: [link] [link] [link] [link] (that's one kickass steampunk mermaid!)


Here's some photographic impressions - KoShiatar was making photos:




Hoping to repeat the experience in the none too far future! ^^ Thanks to all!

I'm in a great artistic as well as creative mood, there's a lot of stuff going on to really push me at the moment. I'm sure the watercolour workshop will profit from it, too. Just two more days!

The main reason for my sense of creative giddiness, though, is that my Rhyddion Chronicles have taken a huge step this week.

Most of you know they're my novel project, and most of you also know they haven't progressed very much in the past few years. I'd known the reason for a long time - in fact, a writer friend had told me some eight years ago (long before I was ready to accept it): I had a bunch of great characters, and a bunch of ideas, a general direction, but no story.

I also found I lacked a setting. So the last two years were devoted to developing the setting. I never thought I was capable of two years of world-building. Well, look what Aedan made me do.

But the one lack remained - I didn't really have a story. I had encounters, but they didn't go anywhere.

So this week, I met with a good fried of mine at Starbucks, armed with notes of the characters and a completely open mind as to where I wanted the story to go, and a double chocolate muffin, a king-size coffee, a Bionade and a turkey sandwich later, we had my plot outlined.

If you're ever stuck in a creative process - get someone you know you can bounce ideas off, and who's going to bounce them back with twists you never had, and voilá!

We slaughtered some holy cows in that session, too. But I'd actually been prepared to slaughter a lot more.

So - prepare for some artwork as well as revised chapters over the next months. I plan to really, really push the story now. Writing Heroes fanfic has taught me that I *can* write nearly four hundred pages in two years, even with school, with kids, and with commission work. And this time, I won't be hampered by not knowing where the heck I'm going.

Beware though - the story's going to be tragic, but then, you always knew that... and the double chocolate muffin never stood a chance of changing any of it.