TIGAER-DESIGN.COM_.v5 – Digital Art by Christian Hecker

Just another addition my captured beauty series. Here i tried myself on HDR photography. It brings up some interesting results. Especially colors.

Wallpapers can be found here.

Regards

In Feucht, bei Nürnberg, wird ab 04.11. (bis Anfang Januar) eine kleine Ausstellung mit einigen meiner Arbeiten sein. Eine Chance sich die Paintings mal in ordentlicher Grösse anzusehen. Mit allen Details und Feinheiten. Wenn Ihr, Du also Interesse habt vorbeizugucken, dann seid Ihr herzlich eingeladen.

Öffnungszeiten
Samstag: 14:00 – 22:00 Uhr
Sonn- und Feiertage: 14:00 – 22:00 Uhr

Das Guckloch e.V.
Friedrich-Ebert-Straße 40
90537 Feucht
Guckloch Website

Regards

Northern Oak, a band based in Sheffield, UK, hired me to create a cover for their upcoming album. 3 weeks ago i completed work on it and finally found some time to add the cover to the site here. I’m pretty proud of the outcome. It’s not what i had in mind when i started the project but nonetheless the result really satisfies me, as well as the band. Check out their myspace site for more info about the band and their music. It was a pleasure to work with you guys. Good luck with the music!

Regards

Lets go back to august 29th. Studiomx-eu, on deviantart.com, wrote me a note to a website. “That site’s name sounds familiar…” was what I thought. The link lead to a website that was holding a contest for wallpapers, icons and other desktop modifications. The website was www.tune-up.com. There are probably no windows user that did not somehow heard of the windows tune up software they put together. It’s well known and respected tool in windows-world.

So I saw the wallpaper contest that was going on there. Winners already picked. And what did win? My ‘Artificial’ wallpaper!!!! And guess who won! NOT ME!

My first thought was “wow”…

“I won a contest without even participating…!” – it was like magiccc. Of course I realized that ‘someone’ took my wallpaper, changed the colors a bit, and submitted it, using his name, to the contest. That someone shall remain nameless. That someone even won a money prize with his truly amazing artwork.

As you can imagine this furry little guy here was definitely NOT amused. I thought about what I could do to resolve that issue. At first I did write tune-up.com a mail. I waited a week with no response from their side. Until then I was calm as a hindu cow and waited for things to happen. Nothing happened and I really got pissed off. The company is based in Germany and I got me their address and wrote them a nice letter. Something in the lines of “move your rear and lets figure out that damn issue…” – more politely of course. ;p I’m not an asshole. At least not all the time. I basically told them to do something against the issue or there will be consequences that both of us don’t want to see happening.

Sure enough this little furball got a phone call 3 days later.

When I hang up the phone again, my first thought was “good for them…”. They excused themselves for not reacting to my email. Promised to resolve the issue asap. Handing out the prize money to me instead that ‘someone’. I was completely fine with that. The only thing they wanted to do was to contact that ‘someone’ to find out his opinion about what happened.

Two weeks later…

I was about to write tune-up another email, asking what takes them so long. The day I wanted to write that mail I got another phone call from them. I told them that I was about to write another mail, just to let them know. They apologized again and thanked me for my patience. “Fine…” I thought. This time they were calling me in a conference. lol That was a quite interesting experience. They, obviously, really saw the importance of what’s going on. They even assured me to give out a short official statement to that whole farce. Then they asked me for some material that can truly prove that the picture was done by me. “Sure man, no problem… I can send you a 5000×3333 psd file if you want…”. That was too much for them. They just wanted some smaller pics that mr. ‘someone’ will never be able to deliver. So I prepared some project testrenders (print res) and other genuine material… I even sent them the original jpg I used to create the terrain. They said, after checking out my website, they trusted me, but want to be 100% sure about the matter. Something I can completely understand. I sent them the material.

Another one and a half weeks later…

I wrote them a mail asking how things work out. Since I did not recognize any progress on their website. There was still the name of mr. ‘someone’ beneath MY work. One day later I got a reply that they contacted him. I got told that mr. someone is still stating that the pic was done by himself alone. He’s refusing to admit that he got the pic from somewhere off the net and used it for that contest. That made me crack up… laughing… seriously. How can someone be soooooo daaaamn…. – whatever. While I did send them all that material – he did send them some weird screenshot. Tune-up told me they would write him another last email asking for more material. They did not expect anything more to come. So I joined another waiting game…

One more week…

Today I got mail from tune-up that told me that mr. somebody did not react to any further mails from them. They took that as an ‘I give up’ from the other end. Finally they reworked their website contest page. It now states my name for the winner and they wrote a short statement on the page about what happened etc.

Finally… it’s unbelievable how much time goes into stuff like that.

In the end that whole episode stole a lot of time, on both sides. It took about two months to resolve that issue. Far too much time. Fortunately tune-up.com turned out to be a friendly and capable institution. There are still good, responsible, people out there.

So much for this pointless thing.

Hope you enjoyed the read. ;p

PS: Thanks again to Studiomx-eu – I would have never found out about this contest without his help. And thanks to Holger at tune-up.com.

Regards

D³SCR!PTION

This actually started as a pure just for fun project. I really needed something to do for my head since the recent time was a plain pain in the ass for me. That kind of explains the dark title. This picture helped me a bit. I found that castle/fortress stock on deviantart.com and asked the owner for permission to use it.

I got permission to use the following stocks:

The-Gothic-Door

The-Arches-6

The-Postern-Tower

Thanks to causticstock.deviantart.com

So I accidently found that tower photo and started to play with it. Check some rough first steps here – somehow I got a drive for that pic and continued working on it. I did not go for my typical accurate way to work here. I wanted to keep it rough and sketchy. I made the pic for the atmosphere… not for the details.

When I came close to completion a friend mentioned “why not trying a night version”… I picked up the idea and worked out a second, slightly different, night version. The title here was chosen to help the viewer getting the right impression when looking at the pic. It’s night, dark, gloomy… you definitely don’t want to be outside at that god forsaken time. Then the cliché hits you with that howling wolf element. I think that brings together everything I intended for that night version.

TECHN!CAL DETA!LS

Technically there is not much to say here. I found a photo which seduced me to work something out with it. Like I mentioned earlier, I have a very kind of sketchy look going on in this painting. I made this painting not wasting too much time on details. I wanted to create a certain atmosphere with colors, shadows and lighting. So the pic is, of course, far away from photorealistic. Even if I used photo elements to work with.

When I was done with the pic I decided to create different color versions of it. I was not sure how I wanted to have the painting look in the end. I think I decided myself for that golden shine one because I don’t have anything similar in my gallery yet… and the colors generally fit, the idea I had in mind, most.

30hrs – intuos3 – photoshop – 5000px wide – 200dpi

Wallpapers can be found in the gallery.

See here for various concept stages.

Regards

The iCreate magazine, based in UK, invited me to present some of my wallpapers on cdrom in issue 47. The magazine is all about apple and macintosh. The perfect magazine for mac users. If you’re home in UK and you own a mac… check out the mag. It’s worth a read. Thank you ben.

Regards

IT’S BEEN A WHILE …! Since the last ‘meet the inspiration’ episode. Our last guest was Syd Mead. A true legend. This time we are in for some fresh blood. Our guests this time are some of the best character artists on this planet. You heard right! Guests. Henning Ludvigsen and Natascha Röösli. I’m glad to have had the chance to interview these both artists and i want to thank them for answering all the questions in such an open way. Thanks a lot! I took this opportunity to work out this interview in pdf format. It offers a lot of freedom and allowed me to widen my experience in layout/design things. I’m no pro but i think the layout works ok. Feedback would be appreciated.

It’s definitely a fun read for everyone who is interested in professional digital art and digital painting. So head on… give it a read!

Meet The Inspiration РHenning Ludvigsen & Natascha R̦̦sli Р16mb

You need the acrobat reader to open the pdf – find it HERE

Thank you.

Regards

MAN! Time flies by. The older you become the less time you seem to have. It’s weird. So here we are again with this years edition of my scenery artwork calendar. When i made the calendar i realized that i made far more pictures than i remembered for the last 12 months. For me it was not an easy year – the more i hope it was for you. Now up to a new year with some familiar and some completely new worlds to discover!

Check here for the Calendar 2008

Thank you.

Regards

CG Chosen is a free online magazine featuring the best of the best digital artists available on the internet. I’m honored to say that i got invited to write a walkthrough for my painting ‘down the river arend’. I’m sure it would be an interesting read for you fine folks. So feel free to check it out and discover some wonderful and fantastic places. Have fun!

INTERVIEWS with digital artists
Joshua Caez

MAKING of’s
The Jungle – by Radoslav Zilinsky
Down The River Arend – by Christian ‘Tigaer’ Hecker
Long Jorney Home – by Nathaniel West

Chosen Artists
Bechira Sorin, Sergey Musin, Phil Mcdarby, Toni Bratincevic

2D GALLERY
Christian ‘Tigaer’ Hecker, Dan Blomberg, Frederic St-Arnaud, Gerardo de Gerardo, Nathaniel West, Raluca Iosifescu, Valentin Petrov

3D GALLERY
Eugenio Garcia, Geofrey White, Jason Godbey, Michel Lanoie, Radoslav Zilinsky

Check out – CG CHOSEN n05 Environments

Today i decided to remove some long time errors on the page. Lots of links got repaired and should work properly now. Especially in the galleries. I repaired the printshop links above every pic. So you can get to the shop from there by clicking on my logo. Aside of that i added fullview links to the every pic for the pages when you click on the comments button. Also repaired some dead links. I’m glad to have that done now. Nonetheless there still seem to be some layout errors in the galleries from time to time. Especially when using InternetExplorer. I’m sorry for that.

Regards

Northern Oak, a band based in Sheffield, UK, hired me to create a cover for their upcoming album. After some research and some concept ideas i found a way to create something they’re very pleased with. So what you see here is probably the final cover of their album ‘tales from rivelin’. Check out their myspace site to get more information about the band and their music.

Regards