Concept artist and illustrator Winona Nelson attended the Conceptart.org Atelier, and currently works for Planet Moon Studios.

She previously worked for Flagship Studios in Hellgate London and has done work for Wizards of the Coast, Platinum Studios and others.

In addition to her concept art, character and object design and illustration, Nelson also does some comics work.

Her web site has example from various categories, but particularly of interest is the “Fine Art” section which includes some very nice figure drawings, cast drawings and portraits, including the self-portrait above, lower left.

Nelson also maintains a blog on which she posts sketches, finished paintings and works in progress; and discusses her ongoing and upcoming projects.

[Via Marc Taro Holmes (see my post on Marc Taro Holmes)]

I first wrote about conceptual illustrator James Clyne back in 2005, and then again in 2006 when he formed a collaborative studio with concept designer Feng Zhu as Gamma Ray Studios, which is no longer in operation.

Since then, Clyne has extended his resume and added to his online project gallery with concept art for feature films like The Poseidon Adventure, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Star Trek (image above, top, with detail, middle) and an underrated and undercirculated science fiction film called The Fountain (above, bottom).

Clyne’s atmospheric, detailed and and imaginative concept images start with traditional media, markers and pens, rendered on vellum, and then move into digital applications like Photoshop for final renderings as digital paintings.

There are 5 instructional DVD’s on the Gnomon Workshop in which Clyne details his techniques. As I also mentioned in a previous post, Clyne was an instructor for the Gnomon Workshop: Live! 2008 event. I think he is scheduled to be part of this year’s Gnomon Workshop Live!: 2009 event, which takes place in Hollywood on June 27 and 28, 2009, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet.

The io9 site has recently featured some additional galleries of Clyne’s work, with his designs for Star Trek, and several more general articles, including a collection of his Sweeping Vistas .

I came across the work of Mark Taro Holmes when I was struck by these two watercolor sketches on the Urban Sketchers blog. They were from his participation in the recent Sketchcrawl in San Francisco (see my posts on a previous Sketchcrawl, and here).

I then looked him up and found his sketch blog, SKETCHtaro, which has a wonderful array of his sketches, largely in watercolor or pen and ink, of both landscapes and figures.

His figure drawings have an engaging looseness, within the framework of accomplished draftsmanship. He has an unusual approach, sometimes drawing the figure in line, but multi-colored watercolor line, applied in brushstrokes that vary in weight and translucency as well as color .

His black ink drawings are frequently concerned with shadow and the play of light across architectural details.

Holmes is professionally a gaming concept artist and art director. According to his short bio on ConceptArt.org, he is currently the Studio Art Director at Ensemble Studios, and and has worked on gaming titles like Neverwinter Nights and The Lord of the Rings Online. MobyGames lists some of his other credits here. [Correction: Holmes has moved on from Ensemble and is now doing concept art for the film industry. See this post's comments.]

Mark Covell is a concept artist, storyboard artist and character designer as well as an illustrator. His illustration clients include Playboy Magazine, Universal Studios, Mercer mayer, Harper Festival, Simon and Schuster, and Lillyfield Press.

His web site has sections devoted to illustration and storyboards as well as concept art, characters and environments. Covell has done concept design for companies like Vivendi Universal Games and Genuine Games.

Covell’s style ranges from softly atmospheric, to sharply rendered to whimsically sketchy. There is also a section of nicely direct life studies on the site.

Covell’s professional work can be seen in the upcoming Volume 16 of the Spectrum collection of contemporary fantastic art. You can see some of his work at the Copro Nason Gallery (via Artnet).

Covell also maintains a blog in which he posts about his work in progress (which includes his recently born son).

In what is probably a nod to their dominant demographic, Smashing Apps, a blog/webzine devoted to online resources for designers and web developers, named the article collecting these Photoshop tutorials “17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls“.

That being said, it’s still a collection of useful Photoshop digital painting techniques of potential interest to many concept artists, illustrators and comics artists, with a variety of styles and approaches, from anime and traditional comics to more realistic and fully rendered images.

Most are brief, but they cover various stages of sketching and rendering, discuss brushes, layer compositing, brush modes and other aspects of digital rendering.

(Image above, left to right:
David Munoz Velazquez, John Kearney, Melanie Delon (see my post about Melanie Delon)
Jim Zubkavich, Marta Dahlig, Shilin Huang
Artgerm, Artgerm, Yu Cheng Hong)

Chris J. Anderson is a concept artist and illustrator working in both the film and video game industries.

He was working with NCsoft, but beyond that I have no information as neither his web site or his blog have any biographical or client history information. (There a link on the web site for a future client list, but it’s not active yet.)

His site is divided between environments, which is evidently his area of specialty, and props & vehicles, characters, illustrations and other sketches and studies.

There is also no information about process; though it looks to me like much of it is digital painting, with perhaps some watercolor or gouache pieces and traditional drawing materials in the sketches.

[Via io9]

I’ll start with a slight disclaimer, in that Gallery Nucleus, which is currently having a solo exhibition of Mike Hernandez’ work, is also currently an advertiser on Lines and Colors.

That being said, when I check in on Gallery Nucleus, it often turns out that they have something on exhibit that is interesting to the point where I want to tell you about it, and I’m trying to do that while the show is current and those in the area can still catch it.

Mike Hernandez is a concept artist and art director at Dreamworks Animation. He has worked on projects like Shreck, Sinbad and Bee Movie. You can see some concept art for Sinbad and Bee Movie on his blog.

Most of the artwork on his blog, though, is his personal work — beautiful small landscapes in gouache, a few somewhat larger ones in oil, charcoal drawings, and marker and ink drawings, often with versions colored after the fact in Photoshop.

Hernandez apparently paints and sketches either on the way to and from work, or perhaps on his lunch hour, as many of the small landscapes are of the area around or even on the Dreamworks campus. They range from traditional landscapes in parks and wooded areas to urban scenes and compositions of industrial buildings, which he renders as miniature marvels of geometric color and light.

Hernandez’ ink sketches, frequently done with a Sharpie, are loose and gestural, but nicely evocative of the California countryside and urban alleyways.

His gouache paintings and sketches are splashed with color and texture, and often have a nice quality of brushstrokes that feel a bit like scribble lines.

Unfortunately, you can’t just click an “Older posts” link to dig back through his blog, as it’s one of those Blogger arrangements where you have to go to particular months on the sidebar; but digging will be rewarded — with life sketches, wonderful charcoal drawings of dogs, photoshop renderings of imaginary scenes and lots of landscape paintings and drawings.

Gallery Nucleus has an online gallery of some of the work that will be offered during the show, though the images on the page are incomplete. (The prices, even given the small scale of the paintings, seem low.)

The Mike Hernandez Solo Exhibition at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA runs from now until Jaunary 11, 2009. There is a reception tonight, January 3, 2009 from 7-11PM.

Reza Dolatabadi studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Dundee, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, from which he is graduating with a Bachelor in Animation and Media Art.

As a student project, Dolatabadi spent two years creating over 6000 individual paintings as frames for a five minute hand-painted animation called Khoda.

The film is a wordless story that is described as a psychological thriller, directed and art directed by Dolatabadi, written by Dolatabadi and Mark Szalos Farkas, with animation by Adam Thompson and music by Hamed Mafakheri.

Dolatabadi also has a web site on which you can see that film, and others, as well as his concept art and sketches.

He also maintains a blog, largely focused at the moment on the reception and accolades that Khoda is receiving, including Winner of the Best Animation Canary Wharf Film Festival (London) Aug, 2008, Award Nominee, Bacup Film Festival (Rossendale) Oct, 2008, Official selection for the “Best Short Film Program” at Waterford Film Festival (Ireland) November 2008 and selections for several other film and animation festivals.

[Via Digg]

Doug Chiang is best known in concept art circles as the design director for Star Wars I and II, for which he also did some terrific concept art. Some of it is featured in the books The Art of Star Wars, Episode I - The Phantom Menace and The Art of Star Wars, Episode II - Attack of the Clones.

Chiang’s career actually started as a stop-motion animator for Pee Wee’s Playhouse. From there he moved into commercials, then to concept art and art direction for Rhythm and Hues and Industrial Light and Magic, and then to Lucasfilm.

At the time I wrote about him in 2005, he had produced his first book, Robota, co-written with Orson Scott Card, a sort of proto-movie/game that was never fully developed.

His web site, Doug Chiang Studio, is a left over from that time, not having been updated since late 2005, but it still has artwork on display from that project.

He then went on to found Ice Blink, a studio that brought together some of the best names in film concept art, including Marc Gabbana, Bill Mather, Mark Sullivan, Josh Viers, Dermot Power and others. Ice Blink ceased production in 2007, but the site still has galleries for the artists.

Chiang has since become part of ImageMovers Digital, a production company headed by Robert Zemeckis, whose first release will be A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey, due in November of 2009.

In the meanwhile, Chiang has a new book out, Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang.

You can find a nice review and overview of the book on Parka Blogs (see my recent article on Parka Blogs).

Rather than a portfolio, it’s a how-to book with tutorials on various aspects of sci-fi themed art, emphasizing Chiang’s specialties in robots, vehicles and spacecraft.

In these days of increased reliance on web-based shopping, online book merchants like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Powells offer much wider selections than physical stores, even large ones, can provide. (Though nothing still beats the personal selections made by owners of small, independent booksellers, if you’re lucky enough to have access to one.)

The big selections of books available through the online sellers works well for finding a book that you already are familiar with and have decided to buy, but browsing, a practice of key importance to all book lovers, is hard to duplicate in the window of a web browser (despite the name).

This is particularly difficult in the case of art, illustration and design books.

The online booksellers have tried to make up for this in various ways with reviews, recommendations, ratings, and more recently, small visual excerpts form the books.

The latter, as exemplified by Amazon, is particularly bad at delivering on its premise, hampered perhaps by overzealous intellectual property lawyers and poor think-through on the part of the company. These “Look Inside” features usually disappoint, showing a table of contents, some opening pages and a bit of an index, but little (if any) of the heart of a book. I get the impression the preview pages are chosen by an algorithm or numeric formula, rather than a person.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a site where art related books are reviewed and described, accompanied by a few carefully chosen (by a human), high-resolution images that really give you an idea of the book’s visual content?

Enter Parka Blogs, a blog by Teih Yi Chie, an illustrator and cartoonist, blogging under the alias of Parka, who makes a point of doing just that.

The Art Book List is heavy on movie and animation concept art, illustration, anime and science fiction, but within that vein does a great job on the books that are reviewed. (If anyone starts a review blog like this for gallery and museum art books, please let me know!)

The reviews themselves are succinct and give a nice overview of the book. The killer feature though, is the selection of well-chosen images from the books, images that are actually representative of the books’ content (are you listening, big-time online booksellers?), and often supplemented with video “flip-throughs”, in which the entire book is quickly flipped through, giving you on overall impression of the amount and kind of images that make up the body of the book.

The still images are linked to larger versions on Flickr, the largest of which are nicely high resolusion, giving you a browsing experience that is next-best to actually having the book in your hands when deciding what to buy.

The Art Book list is divided into types of movies, individual studios (like Pixar and Studio Ghibli), as well as collections of work by individual concept artists, illustrators and others.

There is also a shorter list of Intsructional Books.

The site provides a list of relevant links; and the blog itself can also, of course, be read like a blog, browsing back by date or searching out topics of interest. In addition to the reviews, he covers topics of interest in similar veins. I came across Parka Blogs when he was kind enough to post a brief article about Lines and Colors a few days ago.

The Parka Blogs book reviews are accompanied by links to the reviewed books on Amazon. Purchases made through his links return a small percentage to the reviewer so he can, what else?, buy more books to enjoy and review.

(Images above: from Parka’s reviews of The Art of Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Miyazaki’s Magical World, Covers by James Jean and The Art of Kung Fu Panda. See my posts on Hayao Miyazaki and James Jean.)