Renna the Snow Witch

Renna the Snow Witch is a character from Elden Ring. We never actually meet Renna in person, instead Ranni initially introduces herself to us as Renna, and eventually we find the Snow Witch armor set in Renna's Rise after Ranni moves on to the latter part of her quest.

Some people have debated if Renna was actually the Snow Witch who served as a mentor to Ranni, but I'm not sure why the debate exists because this is about as spoon-fed to us by From software as it gets. Not only was Renna the actual identity of the Snow Witch, she is also the Third Sister of Rennala and Rellana.

What is an actual mystery from the lore perspective, is what exactly happened to Renna? By the time the Tarnished player character gets to move the story forward she appears to be gone, and most likely dead. Only traces of her remain, and perhaps Ranni assumed Renna's identity to hide from the Two Fingers after pulling off the double assassinantion during the Night of the Black Knives. She modeled her new body appearance after Renna and managed to avoid detection for a very long time... The only way the deception would have been effective, is if Renna was indeed famous enough for Ranni to pull off that stunt. So this may be obvious to us as the story unfolds that Ranni is not who she initially claimed she is, but we do not get any decent information hinting regarding what actually happened to Renna the Snow Witch and how or why she died. This is rather important because both Rennala and Rellana were clearly extremely powerful, and expecting their third sibling to be lacking in both power and importance to the overall world development is strange...

This was an ink drawing which was modified and painted over digitally to create the image you see above. This is not my usual style but I decided to try something new and to leave it rather simple.

Baba Yaga's Walking Tree House

This is an illustration from 2021 that I spent a lot of time on. The original was an ink sketch that I wanted to turn into a full up color drawing and I did not take the most efficient approach.

For some background, Baba Yaga is a folklore monster... some times in movies portrayed as a male demon. I am Slavic though, and our version of Baba Yaga is an old witch that flies around on a broom stick or a mortar. When I was little my grandma used to try to scare me with stories of Baba Yaga and even told me her house was a tiny little utilty hut between the big apartment buildings we lived in. In the folklore, her house is actually mobile, and has chicken legs to move around on. Also the old crone is portrayed as cannibalistic, especially preferring the taste of young children.

I was intrigued... though I don't think I was ever really scared of the old witch. I just never found the Bulgarian "babas" scary, though other people might be onto something!

This is my interpretation of Baba Yaga's house, I like the idea of living trees that are their own characters, and chicken legs are just too tasty to be spooky!

This little wizard is not Baba Yaga, but is a visitor, and the tree is reacting to the intruder. If you pay attention to my drawings you may see this little red robed wizard show up in quite a few places. There must be a good reason to visit Baba Yaga, but we might never find out the exact cause.

Ink drawing sketch is how this started.

I refined this ink sketch digitally and then colored it. It looked cool, so I thought why not do illustration around it by placing it into a scene? This did not work out very well as the colors were clashing, the values were wrong... I spent a lot more time on this than I should have. Even now in 2025 I did some adjustments and painted in some details to clean this up. In the end some gradient maps and color overlays seem to have brought the image more together. I get frustrated looking at it though.

Of Fire and Ice - Stibnite

This is a sketch from 2012 that also had another figure in the background. The drawing got heavily reworked and was never published before. I colorized it for the #Huevember2025 challenge over at Cara.app

The challenge was to use certain hue or color in an artwork on a specific day. On the 19th and 20th day of November the hue was "Stibnite" which is a grey-ish metal alloy which is toxic. The hues shown in the color picker for the challenge were very blue-ish though. I decided to use both a color layer to shift the drawing's colors to the blue and a gradient map with the dark values mapping to stibnite but the lighter values being mapped to warmer orange and red hues which were also part of the overall color pallete for the month of November.

The character is a fire witch.

Witch - Character Design from 2019

This is a character from the Eternal Seven story. The original ink drawing was made in 2019. Painted over and fleshed out in 2025.