Vacation

Work on the Wormworld Sage graphic novel didn't go too smooth in July. We had some terribly hot days in Germany and when I came home and had barely survided the workday I wasn't able to sit in front of my own computer and work even more. Also, there were a lot of social events last month which all demanded their part of my time. However, I managed to work at least 12 hours on the graphic novel and have now reached the 70% mark. I'm in the middle of milestone 4 so to say and now I'm taking three weeks of vacation from the project and from life in general.

I'm traveling to Spain to where the family of my wife lives and I'm going to gather some energy for the rest of the year. I'm a bit exhausted from the year so far and although I think that I generally managed to keep a balance between my life, my job and my private projects, the vacation comes just at the right time. I'm taking my sketchbook with me so prepare for a big load of sketches in the next update! I'm looking forward to visiting some of my favorite places in northern Spain which have been a huge inspiration for my work in the past.

For this update I have chosen a panel that fits the occasion perfectly. Jonas leaves for the summer holidays and he's taking a moment to reflect on the things that lie behind him and on those that lie before him. Some very exciting things are going to happen but right now it's time for a pause.

Ok, I'm off then! See you in September!

Milestone 3 accomplished

Alright, a month has passed since the last milestone and it's time for an update. Milestone 3 was accomplished in about 27 hours. Therefore I should have finished it a bit ealier but some extremely warm weather and the FIFA worldcup have occupied some of my freetime last month. Well, I'm happy with my progress anyway and I'm looking forward to the next milestone. There's a significant twist in the story now and some very special panels have to be painted right at the beginning of milestone 4. I'm afraid, that from now on I won't be able to post a lot of panel artwork anymore. I want the second half of the first chapter to remain a complete mystery right up to the day when it gets published. However, this panel here was already shown as a layout so I guess it's ok to show it to you.

I want to thank you all for your encouraging comments. It really means a lot to me to get in contact with you through this blog and I'm insanely looking forward to the day when I'll be ready to share my work with you in it's completed form.

Do you remember that feeling?

I bet you didn't expect the next update so fast, did you? Well, I just happened to have finished a panel that I was looking forward to right from the beginning of the project and I wanted to share it with you directly. :)

I hereby admit that I tend to get nostalgic about childhood. Well, big surprise. However, the Wormworld Saga will get a good share of this sentiment, especially in the first two chapters. There are several key memories that transport that feeling especially well for me personally. One of these memories is about car rides over long distances. It's a special atmosphere in these memories. The sunset, the humming of the car engine, the muted music from the radio. Time seemed to stand still on these journeys. Interestingly this also happens to be a favorite panel of my wife. It looks like she also remebers the feeling and I was wondering if this might be one of these 'universal childhood memories' that everybody shares.

As you can gather from the posted panels so far, the Wormworld Saga starts with a longer car ride. I find these moments of transition very effective to begin a story. I love how "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro" - these two masterworks of Hayao Miyazaki - start with car rides. It's in that spirit that I want my story to begin. A slow transition from a bright, loud and busy world to a place where wonder awaits.

Milestone 2 accomplished

I'm back with some news on the progress of the Wormworld Saga Online Graphic Novel. I have moved past the 40% mark and therefore have reached the second of my five milestones for the first chapter. And like I promised I have some first real panel artwork for you to see! This artwork has yet to be composed and color corrected and I'm constantly fixing details in all panels but it gives a good first impression of the look of the graphic novel I think.

As you can see, the first chapter contains a lot of unusual subjects for me. I'm not really used to painting scenes from the real world. I like to paint nature and fantasy scenes. All the straight lines and angles in the architecture and the cars were really hard work for me and it also wasn't easy to find the right style for these elements. I didn't want to become too clean in the rendering but on the other hand I also didn't want the hard and shiny surfaces of the cars for example to look too sloppy. I hopefully have found a balance here that will fit to the fantastic subjects that will emerge later in the story.

Fortunately, by reaching the 40% mark I've also come to the point where the action leaves the city now and moves towards new subjects.

The fact that I had to paint a lot of stuff that I normally don't paint also had an impact on the time I needed for the second milestone. I painted a total of 45 hours on 18 panels so I'm way over my estimated 26 hours from after the first milestone (which had only 9 larger panels). My current estimation is, that I'm going to need a full month for every milestone from now on, Hopefully I'm able to finish the third milestone in June and the forth milestone in July. In August I'm leaving for a three weeks holiday in Spain where I'm not going to work on the graphic novel (except maybe for some script writing and sketching) so that the last milestone will have to wait until September. If everything works out like expected I'm going to design the Wormworld Saga website in October and might be ready for launch at the beginning of November - exactly one year after the announcement of the project on daniellieske.com. Well, that would be nice.

I'll keep you updated!

Welcome to the Wacomworld!

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from an  acquaintance at Wacom Europe. They needed an image for a product flyer for the Intuos 4 graphic tablet series and they needed it fast. Like "in fifteen minutes" fast.  From work I called my wife and explained her how to upload one of my illustrations to a server and the file arrived just in time.
A few weeks later I got a surprising email in which I was informed that the illustration was so well received that it now would be used in a big digital content creation marketing campaign. "Welcome to the Wormworld" is now featured in magazine and web ads and on the Wacom Europe website.

I'm really happy with the result. With it's dark borders and the sparkling colors in the center, the artwork nicely fits the dark design of the Intuos 4 graphic tablets and the new Cintiq 21UX.

To put this into perspective I have to say that I'm a long time partner of Wacom Europe. Our collaboration started in 2004, when I contacted the Wacom Europe marketing out of the blue and asked if they would like to support our german digital art web community at digitalartforum.de. They liked the idea and since then are generous sponsors of our website and community conventions. Since last year I'm an official "Wacom Evangelist" which basically means that I'm promoting Wacom hardware and it's use and that I give input on new developments. Wacom Europe has gathered a colorful group of creative individuals for their evangelist programm. You can get some insight into the programm on the Wacom Evangelists Blog.

We had a holiday yesterday and today I'm also off from work so I'll make some good progress on the graphic novel. Milestone 2 is approaching and I'm planning to post some panel artwork in the next update.

First Milestone reached!

Today I have officially reached the first milestone of the first chapter final artwork creation process. I have created (slightly over) 20% of the final art, measured by lenght. After reaching the end of a section I created this milestone plan to review my progress and to estimate the time I'll need to finish the whole thing.

I spent 24 hours on the artwork that now is implemented into the layout. However, I also spent close to 13 hours on artwork that I discarted completely. Like I've already written in an older post, I had some problems to find the visual style that I was looking for. I guess that I have overcome these problems now and that I can calculate with the 24 hours for the rest of the artwork. That would mean another 100 hours of work in front of me. Given the fact that in the first 4 months of this year I have managed to work 187 hours on my private projects, which makes 46 hours a month, I can estimate to finish the first chapter somewhere in July. I'm concentrating on the graphic novel but still have some other stuff to do so that will be end of July, perhaps August. That would be cool. After finishing the first chapter I'll also have to build the Wormworld Saga homepage, which should take a month or so, and then the adventure can begin. Well, we'll see how accurate this estimation is. Life can't be calculated and who knows all the pitfalls along the path?

Thinking in these timeframes is challenging sometimes. I often think about how fast I could be if only I could work fulltime on the project. Right at the moment I spend 10 hours a day at the job to be able to work 2 hours a day on the project. If I could spend 8 hours a day on the graphic novel I could finish the chapter in 15 days. That's three weeks with free (!) weekends. But thoughts like these lead to nowhere so I just keep on working. The milestone chart is a great motivation. I'm actually getting somewhere and I'm really looking forward to share my first chapter with all of you as soon as it is ready.

In the meantime I have some character artwork for you. Here you see Jonas' teacher Mrs. Rubens:

And of course I had to figure out how Jonas looks in everyday life when he's not wearing his adventure outfit. I had the idea to give him a Captain Orion T-Shirt. I figured out that this might be a movie in Jonas' world that boys like him would be a fan of. :)

Ok, back to work!

First "wormsealed" artwork

I'm not drawing a lot on paper. All the drawing for my artwork and the graphic novel is done in Photoshop on an Intuos4 graphic tablet from Wacom. But now and then I pick up good old Mr. Pencil and do a little sketch. This time I created a little gift for someone who ordered his second digital print from me and who had to wait over a week for his order to be processed because I overlooked a notice from Paypal. It's not always easy to do this stuff all on my own and mistakes can happen. On the other hand, that way I have the possibility to connect more closely to the people who support my artwork. I hope that he enjoys his custom drawing and that it makes up for the delay. He's the first one to receive an artwork that features the original Wormseal stamp!

I'm still busy with the graphic novel. I'll  post a milestone update this week!

Panel artwork sneak preview and Wormseal stamp

I'm back from a ZBrush workshop I gave at the Media Design Hochschule in Düsseldorf and I guess it's about time for an update. I had a real struggle with my first panel artwork. I was trying too hard to be especially smart with my painting and totally screwed up. Although I had chosen a technique that should speed things up, I was slow and although I tried to be flexible by using a lot of layers in Photoshop I never arrived at the right result. I discarted a lot of work in the last weeks and started to get really nervous. The worst thing was, that my first painting sessions wheren't fun at all. They felt like work. I tried to figure out what exactly my problem was and again tricked myself by coming up with all sorts of smart reasons why my work didn't turn out right. Before I went on my workshop, I was really lost.

It's always helpful to get out when you're stuck with a problem. The workshop lasted for three days and I lived in a hotel during that time and my daily routine was completely changed. I got distracted from all the theories about my painting problems in my head and finally had my breakthrough when I started painting without worrying too much about the result. I was in a hotel room and couldn't expect a perfect result anyway, right? I used a minimum of layers, worked completely unstructured and relied on my gut feeling. The result turned out satisfying and, most importantly, was fun. I think I'll be able to relax about the whole thing now and just paint my graphic novel. I don't know why things that should be so easy turn out to be so hard sometimes. It's all in the head. We shouldn't use our heads too much when it comes to certain things, I guess.

Here's a first sneak preview from my first panel artwork. I don't want to show too much before the first chapter is released and therefore it's only a small fragment:

And there's another thing to show you! Two weeks ago I received an item that I had ordered over the internet:

It's a stamp of the Wormseal! It is 6 centimeters in diameter and produces a very detailed, forgery-safe mark which looks especially cool in red color. I'm planning to offer a wide range of low priced digital prints of selected panel artwork from the Wormworld Saga online graphic novel as soon as the first chapter is released. Every print will be hand signed and marked with the Wormseal stamp in order to create a unique collector's item for everyone who wants to support my project. I'm really looking forward to making these available to you.

There's no way around!

All right, I was hoping that after finishing my teaser artwork for the magnificent mystery project I would instantly be able to update the blog with all the glorious details. Well, it looks like we'll have to wait just a bit longer until an official press release is ready and so I'm updating the blog with some news on the Wormworld Saga online graphic novel.

Well, I have to start it now.

There is no other task in the way, no obligation that's holding me back (well, I could do the taxes...) I now have time to do the final artwork of the online graphic novel. The layout is ready and I've gotten very positive feedback from test readers over the last two months. I even have a professional translator checking my writing and all I have to do now is to paint it. And it's really damn hard to just start!

I made a first move yesterday and made some decisions concerning the dimensions of the final artwork. The online graphic novel will be displayed much like the online exhibitions on my website. It will be 1024 pixels wide (centered in the browser window) and the layout was painted directly in this size. For the final artwork I'm going to work in three times the final resolution which means that the panels will be painted in 3072 pixels width. The decision in which size to work is an important one and I'm pondering on this questions for some days now. A too high resolution creates too much space that wants to be filled with detail. On the other hand, a resolution too small doesn't hold the detail when it is needed. First I thought, double resolution would be ok but my plan is to offer prints of the panel artwork and therefore I changed my mind towards tripple resolution. On a sidenote: the online graphic novel will perfectly fit the size of Apple's iPad (which runs a resolution of 1024x768) in landscape mode. I'm vaguely thinking about the possibilities of creating an app for the iPad which could feature extra content and which people could purchase to support my project. Well, but in any case the iPad will be a great device to read the online version of the Wormworld Saga OGN.

Well, now that this is decided, I can start.

Yeah...

... and then I have made a small but important change to my story development wall:

In earlier posts you can see that I had arranged the post its in a timeline fashion. At some point I felt uncomfortable with this arrangement because it made it very hard to change the number of post its of a given chapter. Now that I have arranged the post its from top to down it feels a lot better. This way it's very easy to add new content or notes to a chapter and I also realized that now the chapters on the wall resemble the final graphic novel which is also a vertical format.

Ok, now ... where was I?

Oh, right. I actually have to create the graphic novel. Well, if there's no way around it...

Finished sculpting

Finally I've finished the concept sculptings of my main character. It took me quite some time to arrive at this point but I'm happy that I've invested that time (close to 15 hours, for those who care about the figures). I really love sculpting and it is a great way to get to know a character. As you can see, I have created a full body figure. I really wanted to get the full picture here.

So, please let me introduce you to Jonas Berg! 

Also, I created a set of emotional states. That was especially fun to do.

 

And it was the moment, when the character really started "speaking" to me. The character lived in my head for quite some time now. But his picture was blured and whenever I sketched him he turned out a different character.

It's a strange feeling to dismiss all these possibilities and to commit to a "face". But now that it's there I'm able to connect much more directly to the character. He's there, he's real. He asks me questions and challenges me to send him on his adventure. Somehow I now feel responsible for him.

And it'll make a hell of an action figure, won't it?  ;)

Next on my schedule is a teaser artwork for ... well, a not yet to be revealed project. But soon the curtain will be raised and I'm really excited about it!