Alexander Character Portrait

Sharing a quick character concept/portrait I did of Lilly's little brother Alexander... for my ongoing River of Dreams graphic novel project. I actually finished this on Friday, but, as blogger was having hiccups then, I waited until now to post.

I also have a neat joint project coming down the pipe... which I will share further details about next post. =)

April's Storm

Busy busy busy! (And I can only show a fraction of it here.)

Just finished another for Pumpkin Tales' author Mark Milbrath. This is an interior illustration for a somewhat spooky Halloween story titled "April's Storm."

Demon Hounds

Working on the look of the demon hounds for one of the covers in progress. The author didn't want them to look cute. I don't think they look that cuddly, though I could be wrong... Maybe they are a little...Okay, where can I get one for a pet? Done mostly in Art Rage 2 (the first time I've used layers in that program or tried something a little more complicated) in a few hours, with "touch-ups" in Photoshop.

Moon Garden for Illustration Friday

Moon Garden



Moon Garden is now in my Concept Art portfolio.

This morning I decided to participate in Illustration Friday for the first time ever (something I have been meaning to do for a looong while). The topic this week is "moon." I did the above image in the space of a few hours in ArtRage 2.

In other news: the huge LDiehl.com site update is finished! The biggest change is that I finally broke the portfolio down into different sections, deciding what they should be was a struggle unto itself. In the end I decided on: Children's Fantasy, General Fantasy and Science Fiction, Concept Art, and Process (which houses images like image step-by-steps and thumbnail sketches). Oh yeah, I also added good deal of new art. ;)

I finally decided to break out of the vertical rectangle thumbnails I had been using, as I've been doing more and more images that are horizontal in nature and having to crop them to the opposite format is just weird. Rather than make square thumbnails, I though I'd just keep the aspect ratio as is and then fill in around the image with background (so as not to mess up my tables).

Shenandoah Valley Artists' Group

I'm in the process of forming a local Shenandoah Valley artists group over at ConceptArt.org. It will be geared toward the practice and study of art fundamentals and be run in a forum-like fashion (where members take turns teaching). More info is available at the thread:


http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=95587

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