My artwork of 2009

For the end of the year I have updated the website with a compilation of my favorite artworks of 2009. I was quite productive this year and you'll find a colorful mix of subjects and an extra dose of my ramblings in the new exhibition.

That's it for this year. I wish you all a happy new year and hope to see you around in 2010!

Cleaning up the slate

I'm slowly getting ready to start my Wormworld Saga graphic novel. I plan to start the practical work in January and I'm spending the last days of the year on cleaning up my project folders and preparing for the big project. I stumbled upon a sketch from early this year in which I toyed around with the idea for some Captain Orion artwork. During the production of my CG Challenge entry which featured Captain Orion for the first time I had started to collect story ideas just to backup the character a bit. Well, these ideas developed into a rough story outline and I summed that up in three paintings that could serve as a setup for the Captain's adventures.

The story isn't too sophisticated right at the moment. It's a classic "guy escapes to a fantastic far off place and becomes a hero" story but I already have some interesting visual cues in mind that could make it worthwhile.

Well, I guess that's just something you also have to do before big projects: shelve the smaller ones until it's their turn.

My inner demons

During a longer phonecall my friend Igino discovered strange creatures in the header image of my website. With some swift brushstrokes he revealed my inner demons!



Or are they his? :)

Mediadesign Hochschule Workshop

This week I gave a workshop at the Mediadesign Hochschule in Düsseldorf. I had three days to introduce a class of game design students to the secrets of ZBrush. For the last day of the workshop I created a quick sculpting to demonstrate the process of compositing to the class:



The Mediadesign Hochschule is a nice place and one of the rare schools in Germany where you can study game design (Bachelor and Master graduation)



I hope I will be able to give more workshops next year.

Celephais

I know, I promised to update the blog frequently. The thing is, that I worked mainly on the website for the last few months and don't have any recent stuff to show, yet. Well, I might as well pick up some stuff from the beginning of this year as long as nothing new comes up! :)

You might wonder about the header image of this blog. The flying ship is part of a bigger image with the title "Celephais":

The image is inspired by a short Story of H.P. Lovecraft with the same title. H.P. Lovecraft is better known for his classic horror stories, especially the famous Cthulhu Mythos, but he also wrote some very interesting "dream journeys". One of them tells the story of a run-down nobleman who escapes into a dreamworld and finally gets lost in it.

''In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacost beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour towards distant regions where the sea meets the sky"

-from "Celephais" by H.P. Lovecraft

The story really fuled my imagination. When I read it, I saw the scenes in vivid color before me.

"For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. At lenght Athib told him that their journey was near it's end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serennian, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky."

-from "Celephais" by H.P. Lovecraft

Well, galleons that float to a city in the sky - I just had to paint that! In fact, the story features a lot of other sceneries that are visually attractive, like the city of the red-roofed pagodas or the desert plateau of Leng. I even started to make plans to illustrate the whole story. Here is a sketch of the story climax where the protagonist is fetched up by the knights of Celephais:



I don't know if I will really dig deeper into this project but I can definitely recommend this story to anyone who likes poetic fantasy tales.

It's done when it's done - and that's NOW!

After 8 month of development I'm finally ready to launch Daniel Lieske.com. For the start, the website features 6 exhibitions containing artworks and sketches from 1998 to 2008 and a detailed description of my 'Wormworld Saga' story project. From now on I will also post in this blog more frequently so stay tuned!

Not much more to say - enjoy the website and let me know what you think!

Work in Progress

Now that the launch of Daniel Lieske.com is getting nearer I slowly want to begin to get into the habit of updating this blog with artwork for you to enjoy. This is a WIP image of an artwork that will be featured in the last exhibition that I have to finish until the website will be launched. Stay tuned!

We are getting closer!

In the last weeks I was really busy working on the website. The reason why it takes so long is not, that I have no time to finish it but that I constantly learn new ways to layout and beautify the online exhibitions. Some of them I layouted and optimized more then three times and now all exhibitions have custom layouts that fit the artworks that are showcases within them. I'm really looking forward to the launch of daniellieske.com and I promise that you now won't have to wait for too long.

However, there is one big exhibition page that I still have to create and it's the one which is most important to me. It's the unveiling of my long time storytelling project and I want it to become really good. So bear with me and allow me some more time to finish my work.

Here's another small sneakpeak just to keep you entertained:

I'm making progress!

I recently had some time to work on daniellieske.com and in fact the site is already filled with lots of content. I have finished all the standard content (about, prints, etc.) and now I'm working on the artwork exhibitions. I want to give you a (literally) small glimpse of the website just to make you curious:

daniellieske.com under construction

All right, I'm working on my new website and opened up this blog in order to test it during development and also to give updates on it's status. When daniellieske.com goes online, this blog will be the main source to get connected to me and my creative journeys.

Let's hope that it doesn't take me too long to launch the website and that there's something for me to show you in the near future.

So long!