Pinterest, Facebook, and Prints

I wanted to let everyone know that my children's illustration portfolio is up on Pinterest. Please feel free to pin away!

I also added my art portfolios to the Laura Diehl Illustration facebook page. Again, feel free to share the images with your friends.

Lastly, I finally found an awesome printer to replace my retired printer of over a decade (Kessler Color, Inc)... This means my print shop is back up and open for business!

LDiehl.com Site Re-Designed!

It had been a good solid year at least (two if you don't count the slight refresh I did last spring)... I fought the valiant fight -but, finally, I bowed to the pressures of re-design.

I wanted a site design that felt cleaner and lighter. I wanted to pare back the old bloated portfolio and divide it into more relevant categories. I also wanted to make a site/blog combination that felt like the same design. And, yes, I finally got rid of the splash page! =P

I'm happy with what I've arrived with, though I am sure there are still a few rough edges to refine. I'm especially happy with the snappiness of lightbox clone "lighterbox2" which I went with for portfolio image display.

Anyhow, do let me know what you think (and if you spot any errors!) =)

Prism - Final

After a bit of delay, I've added the final cover painting for The Terror of Prism Fading to my site gallery. I'm really happy with the way it turned out! :)

New Site Design Launched!

If you've visited my site in the past few days you may have seen some very curious things. Not to mention upheaval, mayhem and madness! Many many hours on my part (and I was wondering why I don't do this more often)... At any rate, I think it is now working well enough to announce a MAJOR redesign. Please take a moment to click through the new site and let me know if you encounter any funny business.

Also, I've updated my "Children's Fantasy" portfolio with a new image. It's a book cover for Anne Droyd and the House of Shadows by Will Hadcroft.

Interior Illustrations and Beliefs

Just finished up an interior illustration project for a client. For something so off my beaten path, it was surprisingly fun -owning much to how easy the client was to work with.

As I don't have any other projects lined up at the moment, I hope to get some work done on my Thunderdome entry. I think I arrived at a composition I liked in my sketching last night.

This is completely random, but I picked up a slew of poetry books a while back and am just getting around to reading them. The choice of the moment is a thick book of poetry by Robert Frost. It's actually quite fun to read (in moderation before bed). Anyway, I came upon a passage in one of his poems last night that really jumped out at me:

For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Seems odd at first, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Aren't most things in this world periodic? Fashion, art, politics, hmmm...

In other news my Under the Raspberry Canes entry to cypherx's "Best Friends" contest has made it to the Finalists Round!

Here are the new interior illustrations I spoke of:

New Work and Best Friends

Site update. Wooh! I just finished up a "personal" painting for a contest Cypherx is holding on Deviant Art. The theme is "Best Friends." I did a painting inspired by one of my favorite childhood stories: The Velveteen Rabbit.

See this Deviant Art link for the image.

And this one for the required WIP.

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).