The art of Kirsi Salonen

This Finnish digitally painting artist likes to sit and draw with her Wacom tablet all the time. She has done so for over five years now and conciders herself as a professional artist and illustrator by now.Many of her works are fantasy art. She hopes to find that unique touch in every work she makes, to give something new to familiar subjects, but more so not so familiar ones.. Blazing and rich stories and heart-breaking fates and creatures are all out there waiting to be painted and told. In other words, telling a story in one frame is her key method.

She also thinks that using effective lights and strong colour schemes and still growing an idea from simple feelings and giving them a Face and a stage makes the picture really rock. The main goal and highest prize is the succesful emotion it creates when looking at the piece. Maybe making you wonder about things in another perspective and even get touched by the work.

Among people and mystic creatures also animals, escpecially dogs and horses are close to her heart. Dogs mirror their owners souls and through them people can discover themselves. Horses are just poetic, magnificent creatures that she can't stop admiring and studying.

Top 8 elements for a fantasy book

Good vs. evil

The conflict of good against evil is a theme in the most popular forms of fantasy, such as high fantasy; normally, evil characters erupt from their lands to invade and disrupt the good characters' lands. J. R. R. Tolkien delved into the nature of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings, but many of his imitators use the conflict as a plot device and often do not distinguish the sides by their actual behavior.

In some works, mostly notable in sword and sorcery, evil is not opposed by the unambiguously good but by the morally unreliable.

Dark Lord

The forces of evil often are personified in a Dark Lord. He is often depicted as a diabolical force, and may, indeed, be more a force than a personality. The effects of his rule often assert malign effects on the land as well as his subjects. Besides his usual magical abilities, he often controls great armies. A Dark Lord is usually depicted as the ultimate personification of evil, and often commits atrocities that make common people afraid to speak their very names (as with Sauron of The Lord of the Rings, Shai'tan of The Wheel of Time, and Lord Voldemort of Harry Potter). Other notable Dark Lords include Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, Lord Dracula of the Castlevania series, Skeletor from Masters of the Universe, Brona the Warlock Lord from The Sword of Shannara, Morgoth from The Silmarillion, Darkseid from the DC Universe, and Ganon from The Legend of Zelda.

Quest

Quests, an immemorial trope in literature, are a common trope in fantasy. They can run from the quest to locate the plot coupons necessary to save the world, to an internal quest of self-realization.

Hero

Heroic characters are a mainstay of fantasy, particularly high fantasy and sword and sorcery. Such characters are capable of more than ordinary behavior, physically or morally, or both. While they may at first be less than the role required, they grow into it. This may take the form of maturation.

Many protagonists are, unknown even to themselves, of royal blood. Even in so fanciful a tale as Through the Looking Glass, Alice is made a queen in the end; this can serve as a symbolic recognition of the inner worth of the hero. Commonly, the tale revolves about the maltreated hero coming into his own. This can reflect a wish-fulfillment dream, or symbolically embody a profound transformation.


Magic

In a fantasy, magic is often overwhelming in presence, although its precise nature is delineated in the book in which it appears. It can appear in a fantasy world, or in a fantasy land that is part of reality but insulated from the mundane lands, or as a hidden element in real life.

A common trope is that the ability to work it is innate and rare. As a consequence, the person who work magic, who may be described as a magician, a wizard, a sorcerer, or many other titles, is a common figure in fantasy.

Another feature is the magic item, which can endow characters with magical abilities not innate, or enhance the abilities of the innately powerful. Among the most common are magic swords and magic rings.

Prophecies are among the most common forms of magic, because they are an often used plot device. Often the very effort undertaken to avert them bring them about, thus driving the story. It is very rare for a prophecy in fantasy to be simply false, although usually their significance is clear only with hindsight. Quibbles can undermine the clearest appearing prophecies.

In The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien deliberately avoided use of the word magic and his characters usually referred to it as "the Deeper Arts". In Star Wars, the Jedi employ the use of the Force, an essentially magical power that grants mystical abilities and heightened senses and skills to whomsoever wields it.


Medievalism


Many creatures seen in fantasy fiction are drawn from the folklore and romance of medieval Europe. Dragons and unicorns are among the most common monsters; rarer creatures, such as griffins, also appear. Races of beings such as elves and dwarves also often reflect medieval sources.

Perhaps even more important was setting. Such earlier writers as William Morris (in The Well at the World's End) and Lord Dunsany (in The King of Elfland's Daughter) set their tales in fantasy worlds clearly derived from medieval sources, though often filtered through later views. J. R. R. Tolkien set the type even more clearly for high fantasy, normally based in such a pseudo-medieval setting. Other fantasy writers have emulated him, and role-playing and computer games also took up this tradition.

The full width and breadth of the medieval era is seldom drawn upon. Governments, for instance, tend to be feudalism, evil empires, and oligarchies, usually corrupt, despite the greater variety of the actual Middle Ages.

It also tends be medieval in economy; fantasy worlds are disproportionately pastoral.

These settings are typically of epic fantasy and (to a lesser extent) sword and sorcery, which contains more urban settings, than of fantasy in general; the preponderance of epic fantasy in the genre has made them fantasy commonplaces. They are less typical of contemporary fantasy, especially urban fantasy.


The Ancient World

A less common inspiration is the ancient world. A famous example is the Hyborian Age (the fictional world of Conan the Barbarian), which features analogues of Ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome, among others.


Sentient "races"


Many fantasy stories and worlds refer to their main sentient humanoid species as "races" rather than species. In most such worlds, these races are related, typically having derived from one root species - most often either elves or humans - by magical or divine influence, or by intelligent design. The usage of the term in this context was popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien[citation needed] and was further adapted and spread by the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Many fantasy settings use the terms "race" and "species" interchangeably.

In role-playing games, "race" typically refers to any species that can be used as a player character. In older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, the primary non-human player races (dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, and half-elf) were called "demi-humans". Later games such as Shadowrun use the term "metahuman", and define these humanoid races as subdivisions of Homo sapiens.

What is fantasy ?

Fantasy is a genre that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, and/or setting. Fantasy is generally distinguished from science fiction and horror by the expectation that it steers clear of technological and macabre themes, respectively, though there is a great deal of overlap between the three (collectively known as speculative fiction).

In popular culture, the genre of fantasy is dominated by its Medievalist form, especially since the worldwide success of the Lord of the Rings books. In its broadest sense however, fantasy comprises works by many writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians, from ancient myths and legends to many recent works embraced by a wide audience today.

Beginning perhaps with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the earliest written documents known to humankind, mythic and other elements that would eventually come to define fantasy and its various subgenres have been a part of some of the grandest and most celebrated works of literature. From The Odyssey to Beowulf, from the Mahabharata to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, from the Ramayana to the Journey to the West, and from the Arthurian legend and medieval romance to the epic poetry of the Divine Comedy, fantastical adventures featuring brave heroes and heroines, deadly monsters, and secret arcane realms have inspired many audiences. In this sense, the history of fantasy and the history of literature are inextricably intertwined.


Many works are unclear as to the belief of the authors in the marvels they contain, as in the enchanted garden from the DecameronThere are many works where the boundary between fantasy and other works is not clear; the question of whether the writers believed in the possibilities of the marvels in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes it difficult to distinguish when fantasy, in its modern sense, first began.

Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (1841), the history of modern fantasy literature is usually said to begin with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858), the latter of which is widely considered to be the first fantasy novel ever written for adults. MacDonald was a major influence on both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The other major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, a popular English poet who wrote several novels in the latter part of the century, including The Well at the World's End.

Despite MacDonald's future influence with At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and Morris's popularity with his contemporaries, it wasn't until the turn of the century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience. Edward Plunkett, better known as Lord Dunsany, established the genre's popularity in both the novel and the short story form. Many popular mainstream authors also began to write fantasy at this time, including H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These authors, along with Abraham Merritt, established what was known as the "lost world" sub-genre, which was the most popular form of fantasy in the early decades of the 20th century, although several classic children's fantasies, such as Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, were also published around this time.

Indeed, juvenile fantasy was considered more acceptable than fantasy intended for adults, with the effect that writers who wished to write fantasy had to fit their work in a work for children. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote many early works verging on fantasy, but in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, intended for children, wrote fantasy. For many years, this and successes such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), created the circular effect that all fantasy works, even the later The Lord of the Rings, were therefore classified as children's literature.

In 1923 the first all-fantasy fiction magazine, Weird Tales, was created. Many other similar magazines eventually followed, most noticeably The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The pulp magazine format was at the height of its popularity at this time and was instrumental in bringing fantasy fiction to a wide audience in both the U.S. and Britain. Such magazines were also instrumental in the rise of science fiction, and it was at this time the two genres began to be associated with each other.

By 1950 "sword and sorcery" fiction had begun to find a wide audience, with the success of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. However, it was the advent of high fantasy, and most of all the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s, that allowed fantasy to truly enter the mainstream. Several other series, such as C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, helped cement the genre's popularity.

The popularity of the fantasy genre has continued to increase in the 21st century, as evidenced by the best-selling status of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. Several fantasy film adaptations have achieved blockbuster status, most notably The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson.

Criticism to fantasy includes it being called "second rate" literature; but author Terry Brooks rebutted this when he answered a question on his official website:

People who view fantasy as second rate or childish are usually people who don't read or understand it. I like to tell them that good fantasy is social commentary combined with good storytelling - Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, the Oz stories and so many others. Sure, the stories take place in an imaginary world. But those worlds mirror our own and tell us things about ourselves that need to be said and understood. I also like to tell them how often other forms of literature use fantasy as the bedrock of their own stories. Fantasy transcends its own form in wider scope than any other type of writing.

Fantasy is a popular genre, having found a home for itself in almost every medium. While fantasy art and recently fantasy films have been increasingly popular, it is fantasy literature which has always been the genre's primary medium.

Fantasy role-playing games cross several different media. The "pen & paper" role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was the first and is arguably the most successful and influential, and the science fantasy role-playing game series Final Fantasy has been an icon of the console RPG genre.

Modern fantasy, including early modern fantasy, has also spawned many new subgenres with no clear counterpart in mythology or folklore, although inspiration from mythology and folklore remains a consistent theme. Fantasy subgenres are numerous and diverse, frequently overlapping with other forms of speculative fiction in almost every medium in which they are produced. Noteworthy in this regard are the science fantasy and dark fantasy subgenres, which the fantasy genre shares with science fiction and horror, respectively.

Professionals such as publishers, editors, authors, artists, and scholars within the fantasy genre get together yearly at the World Fantasy Convention. The World Fantasy Awards are presented at the convention. The first WFC was held in 1975, and it has occurred every year since. The convention is held at a different city each year.

Additionally, many science fiction conventions, such as Florida's FX Show or MegaCon, also cater to fantasy and horror fans. Anime conventions, such as JACON or Anime Expo frequently feature showings of fantasy, science fantasy, and dark fantasy series and films, such as Cardcaptor Sakura (fantasy), Sailor Moon (science fantasy), xxxHolic (dark fantasy), and Spirited Away (fantasy). Many science fiction/fantasy and anime conventions also strongly feature or cater to one or more of the several subcultures within the main subcultures, including the cosplay subculture (in which people make and/or wear costumes based on existing or self-created characters, sometimes also acting out skits or plays as well), the fan fiction subculture, and the fan vid or AMV subculture, as well as the large internet subculture devoted to reading and writing prose fiction and/or doujinshi in or related to those genres.

CG fantasy artwork

Celtic art

Celtic art is art associated with various people known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient people whose language is unknown, but where cultural and stylistic similarities suggest they are related to Celts. Also covered by the term is Celtic revival art from the 18th century to the modern era, which began as a conscious effort by Modern Celts to express self-identification and nationalism.
Typically, Celtic art is ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature central to the classical tradition, but as far as we can understand it often involves complex symbolism. Celtic art has used a variety of styles and has shown influences from other cultures.
Celtic art is a difficult term to define, covering a huge expanse of time, geography and cultures. A case has been made for artistic continuity in Europe from the bronze age, and indeed the preceding neolithic, age however the 'celtic' culture is generally considered to arise in the Iron Age at around 1000BC. There are three "traditions" of Celtic art, the first being the continental Iron age art mainly associated with La Tène culture which draws on native, classical and (perhaps via the Mediterranean) oriental sources. The second, Iron Age art in Britain and Ireland, draws on the continental tradition while adding distinctive regional styles. The third, the Celtic "renaissance" of the early Middle Ages in Ireland and parts of Britain, is also called Insular art. This third tradition formed the basis for the art of the Celtic revival beginning in the late 18th century.

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