Reto Kaul is a young (20 yr old) freelance concept artist and illustrator from Switzerland. His web site lists his work experience as concept design, book illustration, covers and fashion design, but doesn’t list specific credits. His portfolio, however, has some nicely atmospheric pieces that show off his talent for dealing with muted light in particular.
His imaginative landscapes and imaginary cityscapes are often cast in compositions with analogous color schemes, largely blues and greens. He likes to punctuate his thick atmospheres with sharp pinpoints of light, and loves to play with the idea of faintly visible shafts of light, fanning out at they emerge through the canopies of trees, break through layers of clouds or splash around a prominence of rock.
He has a nicely balanced command of his digital tools and his pieces have suggestions of texture and detail without being overworked.
His online gallery is a little shy on information about the pieces, but if you hover your mouse over the thumbnails you’ll get a “tool tip” style pop-up with the name of the piece.
You can also find more info about the images (and some larger images) on some of the various concept art sites where he has a presence under the handle “gizmodus”.
Mirandopolis: Museum of Modern Art (image above, with detail, bottom, larger image here) is part of a series in which the museums of the imaginary city (no relation, I assume, to the actual municipality of Mirandópolis in Brazil) are pictured as built in a gigantic cave.
He also has images of an airport and cathedral for the city, and you can see a step by step for his image of the cathedral here.
Nice… But it gives me the feeling I saw already this kind of paintings. There are a lot of people working good in this inspiration and I’m so dumb than I cannot see the differences between them :-) Well, he is young and we can hope I’ll find his way…
as Li-An said,
there are a lot of similitudes in some today concept artists work. Specialy until the use of digital art. A lot of people use and abuse of photoshop or painter special brushes and tools to render some kind of texture or atmosphere. The good ones are those who can evolve in their proper style. In that case he is young and have a lot to discover… but I think there will be no problem for him :)
Li-An and Krum,
Thanks for the comments. I will certainly agree that many of the concpet artists workin in this manner can look very similar. Part of that is probably the use of similar digital painting techniques, but I think it has more to do with the influence of other artists in the field than any limitations of digital painting.
I think some of this comes from the rather insular “community” of digital concept artists viewing one another’s work on portal sites like the CG Society. As you said, it just takes time for young artists to discover their own style.