(^) and the very active volcano there. I made the
rock feel more moving and soft and added a rich
red and orange hue to all that grey and black
and it really paid off as a piece full of impact. To
this day it is by far the most popular artwork I’ve
ever done so it makes me feel a huge
accomplishment to have created it.
DAL: What’s your opinion on using 3D to “speed
up” the production of 2D art?
CL: I’m all for it, personally. I don’t see any
limits with digital media and the use of mixing as
many sides as possible can only help to improve
what is already there. I’ve never been much for
classifying things into specific areas and then not
mixing them, I like the idea of no boundaries
and creating something unique and potentially
better by going outside the normal areas and
experiment with combining different fields. I’m
all about the end result and the way to get to
that result can be in so many different
directions.
DAL: Let’s turn to your commercial ventures
now. You tried a Kickstarter in late summer
- How did that go for you, and what did
you learn from it?
CL: The Kickstarter campaign was run by one of
the studios I help out working for, so it was not
my personal Kickstarter per se. I helpedpromoting it and I was part of the company
team if it was to take off. But sadly it didn’t get
funded. The studio works with a lot of manga/
anime orientated art and my role there is being
an environmental/background artist. I have done
numerous backgrounds for their animations for
both smaller and bigger films and trailers. My
type of environment style fits very nicely with 2D
fantasy animation movies and reels such as
manga/anime.
DAL: And you offer 35,000 of your photos on
your stock site at CA-Stock.com. All for just $1
access per image. That’s an excellent offer. Tell
us more about how that site came to be, please?
CL: My long time partner and I share a common
interest of travelling a lot, so living in various
countries around the globe is something that
comes naturally to me. Back in 2012 we finally
did a year of backpacking around the globe,
something we both had been dreaming about
doing one day.
It was an amazing experience and we saw so
many widely different landscapes and peoples,
cultures and wildlife. It had a huge impact on my
art style. So many places we find in fantasy
artworks really do exist on Earth! We ended up
making over 60,000 photos on our trip, and
being a digital artist I rely heavily on using stock
photos for my artworks. Having my own stock
library helps a lot since using stock images can
get very expensive. With all the photos we had,
we thought that offering them to other artists
that might not have all that money to spend
could be a good idea. We named it http://www.CA-
Stock.com so that people finding it might
recognise it from my DeviantArt stock account
with the same name. The small cost per image is
more of a symbolic sum to be able to afford
paying for the website they are hosted on. In
reality the target of these photos are for other
artists needing affordable and easy to use
photos for their artworks. Therefore they also
come with very simple rules and none of the fine
print and huge sums that normally goes with the
larger stock sites.
DAL: Sounds very useful. Tell us about your
book and music album cover art commissions,
please.
CL: Most of the book covers I’ve done are for
self-publishing authors mainly writing teen and
adult fiction. I think my art style is bested suited
for these kind of books, so it makes sense that
the authors from this genre are my main clients.