Daniel Athas Holly
Illustration Projects
For nearing thirty years, I have ventured into digital illustrative endeavours, beginning with a student copy of Photoshop 7 that I purchased from Madison College. I specialized in antique and railroad photo restoration and design. Since then, I worked in 3D with the discovery of Blender in its early days, focusing on character art and narrative illustration. Then came 3D printing, and a curious opportunity to become a lead print designer in Hasbro's year-long SuperFanArt project. Even beyond this, I have had the fun of working with videography and effects in my teaching and curriculum design years. These days, as a veteran of 2D, 3D, and similar media, and as a full-time father and provider for my family, I have incorporated A.I. and render engines with those other skills, combined to produce composite illustrations for my own books and projects. What you see here is a variety of my work and projects over the years as an illustrator and 3D designer and artist.
3D Modeling Work Sample
This video is the screen capture of a "resurrection" project, after a catastrophic double-hard drive crash during backup, losing me all original 3D data of the first draft of Last Astronomer's book cover, including character models, rigging, even most of the materials I'd spent months putting together and rendering. The original models took a week, but I kept working on them for future projects for a long time after tha. The video tells the rest, and though heartbreaking at the time, it changed the course of the book series in surprising ways!
Book Trailer Animation Project
Below is a book trailer I made while working my way through grad school. Book trailers were a new concept at the time. I gave myself six months to both learn the skills and complete the project during a semester at Hamline, and this is the result. I learned so much in the project that I used ever after. The only limitation I found was that I couldn't get the locomotive steam venting to work without my pitiful laptop crashing. You'll see the hat blow away as the camera pans toward the train, which was supposed to be due to the aforementioned venting. I ended up adding a simple breeze sound effect to compensate, but always felt it was incomplete without this visual effect.
3D Printing: Dioramas & Figures
As mentioned above, I spent a year working with Hasbro on their SuperFanArt project as one of the lead designers for My Little Pony prints. Seriously. But we kept going, into classic game characters and others. From trade shows and even a commercial or two, it was a wild ride. You can see some of the projects below, and they're even still available!
3D Printing: Jewelry
Alongside our BitScenes project of figures and models, we worked with Shapeways on some nerd jewelry, but our bread and butter was Impressions, a brand of actual baby footprint engravings with birth information on pendants, dogtags, and other forms.
