Sunday, April 11, 2010

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.

4 comments:

  1. Wow, that stamp is great! Where did you get it made?

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  2. I ordered the stamp from http//www.stelog.de/. It's a german site so I don't know if it's of any use for you. However, they produced the stamp from a black and white bitmap file in 300dpi resolution and it was delivered in only a few days. Together with a stamp pad and stamp color the costs added up to 75€ (~100$). It's really fun to use although it's not easy to produce a decent mark. The foto shows the best mark from a whole series of much worse ones. I still have to gather some experience with the stamp before I'm able to produce constant results with it.

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  3. I discovered your homepage some time ago and was really fascinated of the Wormworld Saga project.
    It's great and highly interesting to see how this project is progressing. Thanks for your detailed reports!
    I'm looking forward to reading the finished story. :)

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  4. Hallo Daniel, der Stempel ist ja verdammt geil. Bin schon sehr überrascht und angetan über die feinen Details die der Stempel stempeln kann.

    Ich werde das hier mal weiter verfolgn, da ich doch interesse an so einem Print hätte. Solange die Prints in meiner Preisklasse liegen werden, hoffe ich was ergattern zu können

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