I first came across Matt Dixon’s work on the CGSociety site, where he has been a participant in several of their “Challenges“, contests in which computer graphics artists create works that are a response to a particular theme.

The great thing about the Challenges is the the artists document their work at numerous stages during the creation process, effectively creating a sort of tutorial for each work. Here is the finish page for the sequence devoted to the image at left, Dixon’s entry for the “Master and Servant” challenge, for which he took second place for 2-D works after Linda Bergkvist’s elegant entry. (See my previous post about Linda Bergkvist.)

The Challenge feature page for each work is a bit like a blog, with “posts” arranged in reverse chronological sequence. Go to the second page and scroll to the bottom to go through Dixon’s creative process from the initial concept sketch to finished digital painting.

You can also see his digital painting process for The Old Man of the Woods, his entry for the more recent “Spectacular” Challenge theme.

The Challenge features are particularly nice in the case of artists like Dixon, whose own site has galleries of his work and a little bit of background info, but virtually nothing about his working methods.

Grounded in traditional drawing and painting techniques, Dixon now prefers to work entirely digitally. Professionally he does concept art for the gaming industry. There is a list of some of the games he has contributed to on the MobyGames site.

The March 2006 issue of Heavy Metal magazine features gallery of Dixon’s work. He is also a contributor to the Event Horizon 2 anthology from MamTor Publishing.