Dan Haard of Turbine's Lord of the Rigns Online: Shadows of Angmar writes a new Developer Diary over on the game's official site.

My name is Dan Haard, and I am an environment artist for The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ (LOTRO). My job is to create, among other things, the grasses, bushes, trees and lo, the very dirt that your character will walk upon as you adventure through LOTRO!

When tasked with creating environment assets for Ered Luin, I first stepped back and looked at the overall ambiance the team wanted to achieve in this area. My goal as an environment artist is to create world assets that not only work consistently with each other, but unify to give the place a distinct visual meaning; a story that even the rocks will tell. In the case of the highlands of Ered Luin, we wanted to tell a story of a frozen wild; a place set apart, as the natural boundary it is, from the rest of Middle-earth.

Read it all here.