I usually try not to make a habit of showing off client work in my personal site. I’ve always believed that there should be a healthy amount of separation between what I do for a living and what I live for. This isn’t to say that I’m not proud of what I do. I LOVE my work and I try to do the best I can but I’d generally prefer people to visit my site and see what really makes me tick. You know, things you’d rather do when you have a billion dollars in your bank account, a manse at the Riviera, and a personal jet to get you there.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a billion dollars, nor a manse, and not even a bicycle to get me from point A to B.

But what I do have a lot of is a ton of unseen stuff. Things I did for other people during my employ as a mercenary. And come to think of it, there are a lot of times when I look through my digital war chest and say to myself, “Hey, that doesn’t look half as bad as I remember it! Not bad at all.”

A few years back, I almost got commissioned to do a series of scenery paintings for some high fantasy audio play. The project unfortunately didn’t pan out so I never got past the thumbnail stage. I think I made a dozen or so before the deal fell through the economic cracks. But that was a long time ago so I got over it already.

But despite all that, these thumbnails were actually quite fun to do. The descriptions were rather vague but I didn’t see it as a hindrance. More like a free pass to do whatever the heck I wanted to do. It also gave me the opportunity to play with various color schemes. It worked in some cases, it utterly failed in most. But all in all it was a pleasant and interesting practice. Click at the images to see how messy they are up close!

And being the obsessive person that I am who spend hours and hours trying to make sure that my inks are as clean as I intended them to be, I’m also the kind of person who keeps unflattened files of everything I do. I justify it “for the sake of posterity.” And in this case posterity did pay off because now I can make a nifty animation of my thumbnailing process: