Name: Jacob Charles Dietz
Age: 38
Country of residence: USA
Hobbies: When I’m not creating new artwork, I like to explore the road less travelled. Armed with a camera or two, I make my way down the streets people tell you to stay away from, as well as wandering out into the desert to see what I can find. Strange? While most people choose to photograph well-known landmarks, I lean toward abandoned cars, vandalized buildings, and mortuary refuse.
What was the motivation / story behind the featured piece? Serenity (Coming 
Storm) is obviously a piece that’s based in Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity universe, so I really wanted to capture the space cowboy/desolate frontier vibe that worked so well in both the series and the movie. I had the Ballad of Serenity looping in my head the whole time I was working on it, so hopefully that comes across as people view Mal standing on the brink as his ever-reliable iron horse patiently waits. “Take my love. Take my land. Take me where I cannot stand. I don’t care, I’m still free. You can’t take the sky from me…”
Favorite Book / Author: My favorite book is Catcher in the Rye. I’m not sure if it’s 
because I see a lot of myself in the book’s protagonist or if it’s because it was just so controversial when I was a kid. Whatever the case, it was a great read and it’s stuck with me for many years now.
Favorite Artist: This is a tough one as these days I truly appreciate the works of so many 
artists—one of the more positive things the internet has brought us. Early on, I was drawn to Manga, specifically the likes of Katsuhiro Otomo and Masamune Shirow. I think it was the hyperdetailed black and white imagery that did it for me and is probably why I like to pack so much into my own work.
When did you start creating art? I started making art for the sake of making art some 
time in High School, though it wasn’t until after I had graduated that I really started pursuing it.
What media do you work in? I started in watercolors and then moved into working exclusively in pen and ink before taking up acrylics and combining a little bit of everything to get the job done. Some of my earliest paid work was for a little start-up game called Magic the Gathering—I did tons of pencil drawings, 
many of which I later inked and colored for cards or other materials, though to this day I have no idea if any of that work was published. I am however pretty sure I made very little money off the deal, but it was great experience for sure! I continued to work in traditional mediums throughout the ’90s, even after buying my first Mac in 1994. I would draw or paint something and then scan it in and mess around with it, which was kind of cool at the time. Now I’m almost exclusively digital, though I do still hand draw graffiti or other elements that are simply too hard to pull off on the computer which I like to think are the kind of touches that give my work a slightly more organic look.
Where your work has been featured? I’ve been pretty lucky to have gotten into some 
placements that I never would have seen coming a few years back – I’ve had work featured in several Ballistic Publishing books, numerous publications including 3D Artist, Marc Ecko’s Complex, GQ, SyFy Magazine, and 3D Artist Direct. I’ve also completed quite a few book covers and contributed to some film projects.
Where should someone go if they wanted to view / buy some of your works? 
While I have galleries all over the place, my site, http://JacobCharlesDietz.com is probably the single best place to view my work and see what else I’ve got going on. I also have a print shop setup where many of my pieces are available as fine art prints through ImageKind and I’m working to add more each week. I also occasionally do a limited edition which I have printed locally and then I individually sign and number them, so people can keep an eye on my site when these are announced.
Have you had any notable failures, and how has failure affected your work? 
Over the last few years, I’ve managed to get some pretty decent illustration gigs and for the most part, they’ve led to more gigs, though they’ve also opened me up to a bunch of crappy jobs that went nowhere and cost me a lot of my time for very little return. As a result, I now focus on making sure the juice is worth the squeeze as there is nothing worse than working on a project and knowing you’re losing your shirt with each additional minute spent on it.
What are your favorite tools / equipment for producing your art? I’m a Mac guy 
and have been all my life, so first and foremost, it’s my Macs that would be front and center. I’m currently using a six year old, first generation MacPro tower for all of my work. It’s a quad 3Ghz Xeon machine with 16GB of RAM and 4TB of internal storage and it’s still tough to make it break a sweat, so I don’t anticipate upgrading anytime soon, but you never know 
My other ‘active duty’ machine is a 2008 MacBook Pro which makes it easier to hang with the family and still work on sketching out new ideas, doing postwork, etc., but ultimately anything I do there gets sent to the tower to get rendered out into a finished piece.
What tool / equipment do you wish you had? Wish I had? Oh man, I’ve been lusting 
after the Wacom Cintique models for some time now. It’s seriously one of the single coolest tools I’ve seen come out in years. I have a nice Wacom Intuos tablet, but it honestly doesn’t get much use as I like to see what I’m doing when I’m using a pen, especially when I’m doing finite texture detailing on a piece. I played with one in store a while back and if I had one of these in my studio, I’d be all over it and putting some serious miles on it.
What do you hope to accomplish with your art? I should probably have some smug artist statement to paste in here, but thankfully I don’t have such a thing on file, so you’ve been spared. Truth be told, I just want to make cool stuff. Seriously, I just make what I would like to see on my wall or on a book cover on my desk. People often try and hire me to make artwork that I’m not into, so I guess if I can keep doing things my way, I’ve stayed true to myself and that is some sort of accomplishment.
I sought to explore the road less travelled. But realization struck me that for there to be a road there, it must already be quite substantially travelled for if it was less travelled it wouldn’t be a road. I needed to find the path less travelled. The track less travelled. I needed to find some scrap of earth that had never felt footfall – but in the process of getting there would create a trail all my own, stymieing my goal in the very attempt.
It’s quite the quandary. One I am yet to reconcile. In the meantime, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Internet.
I’m really diggin’ this artwork! When saw the new cover art this time around, I couldn’t stop an instantaneous big grin. The other work featured in the interview is awesome.