Artists I Like: Rune Ryberg

I'll do a few posts rounding up artists whose work I really enjoy. I'll present a few examples and talk about why I like them. I'll link to their pages and other ways to find out more, if such exists. These are presented in no deliberate order other than the order in which I thought of them and did the work of posting about them.

INSPIRATION

There's something remotely cannibalistic about being an artist. I "consume" art, process it inside my mind, then things come out the other end that include bits of the art I consumed. It's a lovely analogy, right? But that's how it is for me. I often say I don't have any original ideas. It's true. Nothing I've ever came up with was cut from whole cloth, as they say. It's patchwork, at best. Sure, sometimes it's novel and maybe you haven't seen anything quite like what I do. But believe me: what I do is riff on what I've seen. That's all I can do.

Art inspires more art. It's a continuous cycle of creation from some ancient beginning to some unforeseen ending. All we are doing is riding that ride, trying to make something beautiful to keep all this beauty alive.

RUNE RYBERG

Rune Ryberg is an artist whose work I discovered randomly on Instagram. As soon as I saw it the first time I thought it was magical. To describe it is hard. To my eyes it's a dose of Richard Sala and a dash of Ed, Edd n Eddy filtered through a classic European comics vibe. Rune is Danish and I honestly don't know much more about him than that. I'm not even sure you can get his comics in English, though I've seen them online in English. The website only lists Danish and French language comics.

His drawings are wiggly wobbly, and definitely feel inspired by the 2000s Cartoon Network era (though that's just a hunch and might not be true). His drawings flow and move. They are kinetic as hell. His comic pages are smooth, constantly in motion, and tell us as much about the character's inner worlds as their outer worlds.

I stared at some of these pages trying to figure out what tools Rune uses. My guess was traditional drawings with dip pen, then digital colors. Turns out I was right about the drawings but he seems to be using Micron pens for inks, at least for his main lines. But the colors... in some works, such as Death Save, they are very flat and I thought digital. But other works are clearly some kind of watercolor or markers. So I'm not sure.

He has a kind of drybrush effect in some of the shading and I'm not sure what he's using there.

Notice how his lines vary in weight a little bit, but not much. Under that, he's often using flat colors to great effect. Vibrant, rich colors that also convey simple depth.

Wonderful stuff. I would pay a handsome price for a big, fat coffee table book of Rune Ryberg art.