Daniel Cox is an Australian concept artist and matte painter working at Weta Digtital, the special effects house that was behind the Lord of the Rings movies and Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong. Cox is working with them on projects like Fantastic Four 2: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, 30 Days of Night and Avatar.

When he’s not drawing and painting for his job, he likes to relax and have fun by drawing and painting for his blog, a Little Golden Blog (the title graphic of which is a nice pastiche of the Little Golden Book kid’s book line).

He likes to keep his painting chops up with sketches and paintings of various playful subjects, doing his take on characters like Conan, Judge Dredd, Hellboy or Wonder Woman; or with quick studies from photographs. In particular he enjoys doing digital and traditional media paintings from promo photos or movie stills of actors like Morena Baccarin (from Serenity) or Eva Green (images above).

Cox no longer maintains a web site with a gallery of his professional work, but if you go back in the blog archives you can find some postings for production designs and matte paintings for movie projects and ad spots. Some of his cartoon-like sketches are quite funny, like his Wyle E. Cyote in 300 parody or his take on Batman’s Harley Quinn as an aging barfly.