Eternally Noir, 2004

I’ve decided to redo the art gallery for this website in a fashion that will make life easier for me. Rather than try to set up a page with little thumbnails that link to other pages I have to create by hand, I’m simply going to post each piece of finished art I’ve got as a blog entry, under the delightful category of “Gallery.” I’ll change the link at the top menu to go straight to this category, so you can see every blog entry just by scrolling through.

And since I’m redoing things, I thought I’d start way, way back at the very beginning of my career as a paid freelance artist. The image above was created in 2004 and is one of the very first ebook covers I did for Logical-Lust Publications. The title was Eternally Noir and the brief I got just said to design something spooky and sexy. This image was inspired by a Michael Whelan book cover done for the Tanith Lee short story collection Red as Blood, a series of fairy tales done by the Sister Grimmer herself.

The image started in ZBrush, where I created the tree in the background. I created the bloody red sky in Bryce, and put all that behind a model in Poser. Then after the final render, I took everything into Corel Photopaint to work a little post-FX magic, enhancing the highlights and shadows and adding that lovely poisonous red glow to the apple. You know, if I recall correctly, I may have actually created that apple in Carrara and mapped it in UVMapper. Can’t recall that far back to be certain.

Anyway, this turned out to be the first of many covers I have done for Logical-Lust, and the first of many that I ended up using everything including the kitchen sink to produce.