Winter Wishes and Covey Awards

Apologies for the lack of updates. Like many people around the holidays, I've been busy with all sorts of things both art and not. I've been doing commissions, painting a really nice gift for a certain relative, buying and wrapping presents and getting together a business winter mailing (among other things).

I also saw The Golden Compass a couple days ago. The verdict is like but not love. Visually it was beautiful. Plot-wise I feel like they lost a good deal of the book's depth. A fun and enjoyable movie all the same :)

I got e-mails from the author and publisher on a contest my cover art has been nominated for. Please vote for my cover painting on The Fireborn Chronicles at the Covey Cover Awards. [There are polls vertically along either side of the blog, one for Most Eye-Catching Cover and one for Most Relevant Cover. My cover is #18 for both.] If you have a couple seconds please vote. Let's show up those photo manipulators! ;) Thank you so much.

Oh yes, I also updated my site with the image below... check out the full version in the Children's Illustration Gallery at www.LDiehl.com.


Warm Winter Wishes!

Fireborn Finished!

I finished up the Fireborn cover today. I also updated my website with both the Lachlei and the Fireborn cover artwork. I'm toying with the idea of doing "mock" up covers in Photoshop for all of the book covers I've done, that would be an easy way to show them "in action" as book covers along side the artwork.

New Site Design!

New Design for my Fantasy Illustration Portfolio - Help me work out the hiccups!

Like the topic says, I've been slaving away on a new website design for my online fantasy/sci-fi/children's illustration portfolio. After getting a new monitor (long story) I realized that there were quite a few problems with the old one ...so I decided it was time.

It is pretty much done at this point. There shouldn't be any issues. I very much want to know of any funny business you encounter, whether it be a page or image that isn't linked correctly, or a spelling error (not that I ever make any of those ;). I'm also super-curious whether or not my shiny new lytebox image script, the code that brings my portfolio images up, works for you. Oh yes, please tell me your browser and resolution along with any comments :)

Here's the link: www.LDiehl.com

Thanks!

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