User Stories
BOOK COVERS
EAMON O'DONOGHUE
Eamon O'Donoghue was born and raised in Cork and Kerry, Ireland. He studied art and design at Waterford Institute of Technology where he graduated in 1998 with distinctions in illustration and photography. After working for various agencies and studios including Feref of London, he began to do freelance work in 2004 in the hopes of making a bigger dent in the world of illustration and design.
Eamon has done work for many animated properties including development and branding, book covers for most of the world’s top publishers such as Penguin and Random House, style guides and concepts for the major toy companies including Mattel and Hasbro, pinup art, comic covers, collectibles packaging and movie posters.
TOOLS USED
DAZ Studio, Adobe® Photoshop
FAVORITE DAZ 3D PRODUCTS
Victoria 5, Akiko, The Girl, Michael 5, Ron Deviney's Photoshop Brushes
Eamon O'Donoghue in action
EAMON O'DONOGHUE USES DAZ 3D PRODUCTS TO EXPAND HIS ARSENAL OF TOOLS FOR CREATING PHOTO REAL BOOK COVERS
"I do a lot of varied work. I like to do many different things. I aim to be Jack of all and Master of all. There are too many cool projects out there for me to just stick with one genre or medium. I progressed to Daz in recent years, a program that spawned a new direction and a new way of achieving art for book covers and the like in a more realistic fashion than my more traditional work. I wanted to offer clients as much versatility and choice as possible. As I was getting older, learning a new program wasn’t something I relished but, much to my delight, I got to grips with Daz very quickly. It was very intuitive and easy to learn. If I had any issues or questions, I could post my questions on the forums where the members are always there to help. It’s really quite awesome that I can do that and it’s much appreciated.
On a typical week my workload could bounce between a digitally painted life-sized She-Ra for Mattel’s booth in San Diego Comic Con, a secret project for Hasbro Toys, a retro scifi book cover for Hachette and a personal Silver Surfer Illustration. All of these projects utilized Daz Studio in some way. For the She-Ra standee, I used Victoria 5 then use that as reference to hand draw the line art. For the Hasbro gig, I used Akiko and the Girl as my doll drawing reference. For the book cover job, I used Daz Studio to it’s fullest, creating a dynamic hero in an action pose (the main focus of the cover) with his space gear, ray gun, helmet and everything the client specified for that character. For the Silver Surfer, I created some sharp and somewhat stylized anatomy for the former herald of Galactus, based on Michael 5. I then rendered him and went to town on some cool cosmos with the help of Photoshop brushes from Daz’s own Ron Deviney.
Daz has bolstered my arsenal for more photo real work and provides excellent reference material for my hand drawings. It’s utterly invaluable. I would be hard pressed to take on the kinds of scifi and fantasy book covers I get asked to create without Daz. I could get a model and take my own photos for more fantastical imagery but that would be fraught with difficulties and logistical problems. Suspending a real person in a bikini as though she’s wearing a rocket pack and trying to get a decent photo would not be a fun process. Don’t even get me started on sword swinging, man! Yikes.
Daz just gets the job done and done well. My clients keep coming back, so I must be doing something right. Right?!"
