The White City in Gold

Well, this update was a little longer coming than it could have been. I guess I got all caught up in the holiday festivities with the fam. 'Twas a lot of fun, but now it is back to work. I've yet to mess with the angel's face or body again. Yesterday I worked on the "first pass" of painting/blending on the background, for everywhere but the city. Today I attempted the city, which for a small area is a big pain.

More on the Angel

Today was rather blah out, even though it wasn't particularly cold it felt like it was because of the color of the light and lack of sun.

The good news: I actually got a chance to work on art. For the first time in a few days I didn't spend the day baking cookies or wrapping. I worked mainly on "smoothing" out the angel's outfit, skin, etc, and on defining form. Tomorrow I hope to do the first pass of blending on the background.

The Color of Heaven

The biggest challenge this past week has been finding any time to do art. Christmas shopping, wrapping, cards, baking, decorating, etc, are a real time drain. Not that I don't enjoy those things. ;)

So the client decided he wanted a background, which turned out to be a greater challenge than I first thought (and, I still don't know if I've got it "right"). At least I kind of got the colors to a likable state. It's harder than you think, trying to find the right colors for Heaven.

Rain and Angels

When it rains, it pours. What an interesting day.

I spent most of the morning working on the first angel character concept sketch for a fellow in California. I got a lot more done on it than I anticipated, which is great.

This evening I received a little reminder of why I enjoy doing freelance illustration. You see, one of the coolest aspects of this job is the element of surprise. There is nothing like getting an e-mail out of the blue from totally neat company that likes my art enough to hire me for a project. At the moment the possibility of working with the Texas film company (that just e-mailed me) to create concept art is pretty darn exciting.

Step one on the first angel:

Numerous Happenings

Good stuff happening today, despite my feeling terrible (I think I'm still getting over the flu). Got a great e-mail on a possible series of angel illustrations from a guy in California, which I'm pretty excited about.

I spent the morning re-writing my Concept Artist cover letter. I think the new version is much better (less recent grad-ish) than it was 6 months ago. I hope to get my job application off in the mail for that open BioWare Concept Artist position (in Edmonton, Canada) soon. Man, would that be a cool place to work -literally.

I also re-organized my website yesterday. I decided that it would be nice to separate the digital illustrations by type a bit more. So I put the "Children's Fantasy Illustrations" and "Science-Fiction and Fantasy Illustrations" (read: the "grown up" book covers) in their own groupings. I also added a number of composite step-by-step images, that go from sketch to final image here:

step-by-steps

Sweet Progress

My next cover commission is still in progress (being edited) so I've had a bit more down time than I expected. So I decided to use my time "wisely" and work on my picture book idea.

I now have a (roughly) 2,000 word story (hopefully, I can further tighten and shorten in the next revision).

On the illustration side. I made a series of tiny thumbnails so sloppy that only I could decipher them in my sketchbook (with a real pen, no less!)

For the past week I've been working to make these into more readable roughs, and also to work out a potential layout. I really like the idea of using mostly spreads, with the first and last images being single-side images.

Here is what I've come up with so-far:



The BIG version (with the actually legable text is here, warning 2.5 MB):

http://www.ldiehl.com/wip/bookdummy_wip.jpg