01. November 2009
"My journey begins on an old and dusty attic. A little boy unveiled a passage to another world and prepared his backpack.
The moment is there - the moment of gathering courage and doing the first step.
I wanted to paint a picture about the nature of journeys. I wanted to show, that you always have to leave something
behind if you want to reach for a distant goal. The boy's belongings are on the left side, as well as his cat and the
place he calls home, which shines a warm light from below the attic trapdoor.
On the right side I arranged things that symbolize the journey. There you find the globe, the telescope, the ship,
the bust of the great Homer and the skeleton which stands for the last journey.
My goal was to create a tension between the two worlds, so the perspective lines are arranged to
build a subtle drag into the glowing painting.
I also wanted to paint a picture about us artists. We constantly struggle to open doors to other worlds with our
artwork and by creating foreign landscapes and fantastic creatures we fuel the imaginations of our spectators.
Our paintings literally become portals into the realm of fantasy and that's why in my painting the zig zag path formed
by the road in the painting and the carpets on the attic floor ultimately leads to the viewer - to invite him to venture on
a journey of his very own."
-Daniel Lieske, 7th of May 2006
'The Journey Begins' holds a central position in my body of work. The image was created in 2006 for
the 19th CG Challenge 'The Journey Begins' on CGSociety.org
and it eventually won the second price in this competition, which I consider to be one of my major achievements in the
international digital art online community.
I actually came up with the concept for 'The Journey Begins' a few month before the CG Challenge was announced.
Back then I only did a quick color sketch of the idea in order to not forget it.
When I found out about the CG Challenge and it's theme, I took my original color sketch as a starting point for my challenge entry.
The challenge motivated me to put a lot of effort into the creation of this artwork which is documented in detail in my
CG Challenge Thread.
Apart from the CG Challenge, 'The Journey Begins' marks the real starting point of the 'Wormworld Saga' which before the creation of
this artwork was only a loose collection of story ideas. The central idea of the protagonist entering a fantastic world through a series
of paintings tied the loose ends together and formed the backbone of his epic adventure.
'The Journey Begins' contains a lot of my own childhood memories and many people seem to connect to that. I constantly get a lot of positive and inspiring feedback on this painting and it's prints have already been shipped to many countries. I'm really happy, that this artwork has started it's very own journey around the world. It's the best that could happen to it.
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