The Gnomon Workshop, which is the online extension of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, is hosting Gnomon Workshop: Live!, a live weekend workshop at the school on June 14th and 15th, 2008.

These in person workshops, meant to bring together interested participants and leading professionals in the fields of concept art, production design, matte painting and character design for the entertainment industry, are held twice a year.

They include both members of the Gnomon Workshop’s distinguished staff and guest artists, many of whom have been the subject of previous posts here on lines and colors.

The June event promises an extraordinary list of guest artists, including: Erik Tiemens, Ian McCaig, William Stout, Marc Gabbana, Gerge Hull, James Clyne, Wayne Barlowe and TyRuben Ellingson.

The page for the event includes links to the artist’s websites, but, in addition to those and the resources you will find on my previous posts (linked above), there is a page on CGTalk devoted to a list of links for some of these artists.

The event will also feature a “recruiting room”, in which supervisors and art directors from the industry will be looking at portfolios and answering the questions of aspiring concept and production artists.

(Images at left: Clyne, Gabbana, Tiemens, Hull, Stout)

In some ways Robert McCall is an inheritor of the mantle of pioneering space artist Chesley Bonestell, continuing to document the space program and visually forecast its future, as well as the future of mankind as we step off our little blue island into the vast sea of space.

McCall first gained notice for his illustrations for a series on the future of space travel in Life magazine in the early 1960’s. McCall began documenting the US space program for NASA, chronicling many of its major achievements in dramatic paintings. His visions of spacecraft, both existing and projected, and scenes of space and the surfaces of other worlds are on display at a large scale in murals for the National Air and Space Museum in Wasington, D.C. the Pentagon, EPCOT Center and the Johnson Space Center.

His work is also in the collection of the National Gallery of Art and was on a series of stamps for the US Postal Service commemorating the space program, as well as gracing emblems worn by astronauts.

His conceptual and poster art for films includes titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

You’ve probably seen McCall’s work many times without realizing it, both in famous posters and accompanying articles in popular magazines. His poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey has become something of a cultural icon.

Even if you’re passingly familiar with McCall’s work, you’re likely to be unaware of the range and variety of his paintings, from accurate representations of existing technology and real events to imaginative projections of visionary futures.

McCall’s site has nicely extensive galleries of his work in several categories. When viewing the thumbnails, rollover the “i” symbol for information about the dimensions, medium and publication of the image, and click on the text link for a larger version (thumbnails are not linked).

The site also has biographic and background information on the artist, as well as information on sales of original art and limited edition prints. There is a collection of his work, The Art of Robert McCall: A Celebration of Our Future in Space, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury, that is out of print, but may be available used. McCall’s site has a limited number of signed copies for sale.

[Link via Randall Ensley]

Sergy Skachkov is a Russian concept artist, who is currently doing freelance work for films and games.

Except for a brief bio on CapucinesBoulevard, I can find very little in the way of information about him or his professional work. He doesn’t have his own web site (at least that I can find), but instead seems content to represent himself in galleries on community sites devoted to digital graphics and concept art, like gfxartist and the CGSociety, where he goes by the handle “Atris”.

You can also find some informal tutorials and articles about work in progress on the CGSociety, as well as more formal articles like this feature article about Dangerous Entertainments, the image shown above (larger version here). There is also a milestone post, in which he posted about the image’s progress as he created it as part of a CGSociety “challenge”, in this case with a theme of “Spectacular”.

Skachov works in both 3-D modeling and rendering applications like 3-D Max, as well as doing direct digital painting in Photoshop. When viewing his portfolio on CGSociety, you’ll find an indication of the software used below the image.

I prefer his digital paintings in Photoshop, in which he often takes on complex compositions and loads of detail, as in the image shown above. I was particularly struck by this image, but didn’t use it here because I didn’t think it was representative of his other work.

Bobby Chiu is a Canadian illustrator and concept designer who also teaches digital painting, both at Seneca College School of Communication Arts and online through the web-based Schoolism.

Chiu shares the Imaginism Studios web site with illustrator Kei Acedera, and also collaborates with her on various works. The Imaginism portfolio can be viewed by work for wither artist of jointly by categories like Girls, Guys, Fairies, Creatures and Cats and Dogs.

There is a section of Subway Sketches, and Chiu maintains a group blog devoted to the subject. There is also an Imaginism Studios blog, more general in topic, shared with Acedera, Stephen Silver, Jason Seiler, and Thierry LaFontaine.

The Imaginism site offers a line of books and prints. The books include the works of numerous guest artists.

You can also find Chiu on the CGSociety site, with a gallery and tutorials like his Making of Three Samurai on Horseback.

Chiu does digital painting of whimsical and bizarre animals (particularly rabbit-sort-of-things), more realistic animals like cats and dogs (though in fanciful interpretations), and and assortment of odd characters including fairies and dragons.

Chiu sometimes works in a detailed and highly rendered style, which can give the cartoon-like aspects of his subjects an extra punch, and at other times in a looser, more casual style.

How about some nice monsters and warriors for a Friday diversion?

J.P. Targete paints wonderfully textured imaginary worlds populated with snarling monsters, glowering demons, deranged warriors, power-mad wizards, seething dragons, jealous witches and all manner of fun beasties and grotesqueries.

Targete is an illustrator, concept artist and art director for the publishing and gaming industries. While attending the School of Visual Art in New York on a full scholarship, Targete began illustrating book covers for Avon Books. Since then he has expanded his publishing client list to include Ace/Berkeley, Bantam, Warner Books, Eos and Tor. He won the A.S.F.A. Chesley award (named for pioneering space artist Chesley Bonestell) in 2000 for best paperback book cover.

His work has appeared in the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art and a collection of his work, Illumina: the Art of JP Targete, was published by Paper Tiger in 2003.

In recent years Targete has been focusing on concept art for gaming companies and worked for NCSoft for a time, contributing to upcoming games like Tabula Rasa and Aion.

Targete is currently freelancing and, in addition to his other projects, is working on a graphic novel. He is also the instructor for a three part DVD from the Gnomon Workshop, Imaginative Illustration with J.P. Targete.

Targete works in a variety of media, oil, watercolor, acrylic and digital. His online gallery is divided into traditional paintings, digital paintings, two sections or concept art and a section of sketches.

Daniel López Muñoz is a Spanish born concept and visual development artist for the film industry now living in California. He worked for some time for Blue Sky Studios and now works for Pixar. His credits include Ice Age: The Meltdown and Robots, as well as a series of 3-2-1 Penguins titles.

Muñoz has been blogging since July of 2006, but his schedule has evidently kept him from posting often. The blog’s contents, while not extensive, do hold enough treats to make it worthwhile; including concept art from various professional projects, as well as some personal pieces.

The blog includes a number of concept designs from the movie Robots, which show that the best thing about that movie was, in fact, the concept art. These make me marvel, as I often do, at the way studios so often take terrific work on the part of their teams and squander it on tired clichés instead of good stories, evidently afraid to do something that doesn’t follow an existing formula.

Of particular interest on Muñoz’ blog are his wonderfully expressive drawings for his contributions to the Out of Picture anthologies (image above). These are collections, originally published in France, of comics stories by artists associated at one time or another with Blue Sky Studios. Out of Picture Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking In was published in the U.S. last year. Out of Picture Volume 2 is due out this June.

The list of participating artists includes a number of artists I’ve featured previously on lines and colors: Daisuke Tsutsumi, Jake Parker, Sang Jun Lee and Peter de Séve. For the complete list and more information, see the Out of Picture blog, which includes a few tastes of work from Out of Picture 2.

Muñoz is also a participant in the SketchTravel project. (See my post from last year about SketchTravel.)

We catch concept artist Robin Chyo at the very beginning of his career. A graduate of Academy of Art University with a BFA in Illustration, Chyo is working to build a career in the gaming and/or film industry as a concept designer and illustrator.

He has begun by establishing a presence in publications like the Spectrum collections of fantastic art (Spectrum 13 and 14, which is where I encountered his work), Ballistic Publishing’s Painter digital art showcase and D’artiste: Concept Art collection, as well as ImagineFX and 2DArtist Magazine.

He has also created a reasonably extensive portfolio, showcasing his abilities in the major areas of concept design for gaming and special effects centric movies, such as characters, environments, props, creatures and mechanical devices.

He has also, wisely, created a web site to make his portfolio readily available. Though it isn’t fancy (probably also a wise decision), he’s done a good job of providing the essentials — bio, resume, contact information and galleries of work that can be viewed by either thumbnails or Previous and Next navigation. He has also added a subtle id mark of his web site address to his images without marring them with ugly watermarks (are you listening, all of you watermarking fanatics?). (I should point out, though, that the “http://” in URL on the image is unnecessary.)

The baseline, of course, is that all of this is in support of very nice work. Chyo’s concept designs show a youthful verve and freedom of imagination that is sometimes more subdued in older veterans in the field. His creatures, in particular, seem more truly alien and less clichéd than most. His mechanical devices, props and character accouterments often have an interestingly organic feeling.

There is a certain brusqueness to his rendering that I find appealing, with an emphasis on textures and a muted palette with highlights of more intense hues.

Chyo lists a number of 2-D and 3-D digital graphics applications in his resume, along with traditional media like pencil, oils and acrylics. It looks like the majority of work in his portfolio is relatively straightforward digital painting in Painter and Photoshop.

All in all, it looks like he’s doing a lot of things right, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we see credits for gaming or film projects on his resume. I just hope that working within industry standards doesn’t take away his imaginative wild streak.

Daniel Dociu is an art director, illustrator and concept artist working in the gaming industry. He was born and studied in Cluj, Romania, moved to Athens and then the U.S., and now lives in Seattle, Washington.

He has worked for companies like Squaresoft, Zipper Interactive and Electronic Arts and is now Art Director at ArenaNet. His credits include Guildwars: Prophecies, Guildwars: Factions, SSX3, James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, SOCOM: US Navy Seals, MechWarrior III, and many others.

Dociu’s images often have a sharp, angular feeling to them, which gives them a sense of energy and impending motion. He works often in what look like science fiction themes, and with environments that convey a sense of monumental scale. His color palette frequently contrasts rust colored oranges with electric blues or icy greens for dramatic effect.

Fortunately, his online galleries feature pop-up images of a decent size because much of what I find most appealing in his work reveals itself in the details, where he is able to simultaneously employ loose, gestural rendering and a remarkable suggestion of detail.

Unfortunately, both his site and a gallery on the Komotion site suffer from less than ideal interface designs. In the former, the thumbnails are too small to judge the image by, and the pop up window makes you wait while it calculates the image size with JavaScript and resizes itself. I actually find the other gallery a bit easier to browse, though I almost missed it at first. In a particularly bad piece of interface design, what appears to be a heading image for a credits page is actually a large button that calls up a pop-up window with a gallery of his work.

Dociu works digitally and there is a nice article about him on the CG Society.

His splintered geometry and whorls of angular forms give his concept paintings an unusual and fascinating feeling of continuity, while still ranging across a wide expanse of imaginative terrain.

Gez Fry is a half British, half Japanese illustrator who has lived in France and England and is currently based in Tokyo.

I think his multi-cultural background shows up nicely in his work, which is an interesting synthesis of influences from illustration, comics and animation from several continents.

Much of his work shows the influence of anime, and anime related concept design (hard to avoid when you’re living in Tokyo). This shows particularly his handling of color. You’ll notice, for example, the use of the “halo” effect, common to anime, where the suggestion of strong light from behind an object is given by softening the edge with a haze of lighter tone or even white, almost bleaching out objects in places. You will also see mecha-like influences in his designs for robots and mechanical devices.

Many of these images, however, have a feeling of three-dimensional solidity and realism that is more European in character, and he has a realist approach to the rendering of clothing and the modeling of faces that is uncharacteristic of anime and associated illustration styles, and gives his style a unique quality.

Some of his drawings, which are particularly appealing in their use of line, are reminiscent of European and American illustrators/comics artists like Jean Giraud or Geoff Darrow. Gez is, in fact, working on a graphic story called Roses & Skulls.

Some of his clients as an illustrator include Adidas, ILM, Nike, Evisu, Adobe, Nintendo, Harper Collins, McGraw-Hill, Marvel and Wizards of the Coast.

I’ve found a few interviews on the web, though very little in the way of additional artwork. The article on the CG Society is notable for having large images of his preliminary sketches, including a sketch for the image above, Winter.

Inerestingly, Gez’s mother is also an artist with a unique style; you can see her web site at mayko.net.

Unfortunately, I found the gallery of work on Gez’s site frustrating on three levels: it uses one of those tedious pop-up-and-close display paradigms, in addition to which you have to horizontally scroll the thumbnails in a tiny frame; and, most frustrating of all, it’s much too short. I would like to see a lot more of Gez’s terrific work.

[Link via Netdiver]

Sai Ping Lok tells us little on his painting blog simonlokart. I was initially confused, in fact, about what his name was. His paintings speak eloquently, however, about the southern California coast and countryside.

With a little digging, I was able to determine that Sai Ping Lok is a background artist, visual development artist and concept artist, with clients like Walt Disney Feature Animation, DisneyToon Studios and Sony TV Studio; and credits that include Mulan, Kingdom of the Sun, Atlanta, Brother Bear and Lilo and Stitch. You can see a small portfolio of his film work on the Creative Talent Network along with a brief resume. His work in included in Jeff Kurtti’s The Art Of Mulan.

He has also received awards and notice in exhibitions for his plein air paintings. His blog showcaces his landscape oils, though pretty much without comment other than their location. He doesn’t even indicate if any of the works are for sale, of if there is gallery representation somewhere.

There are also not very many works posted, but the ones that are there are alive with the brilliant hues of the California landscape, fresh with confident brushstrokes and rich with atmospheric depth and the play of sunlight and shadow.

I was particularly struck by the rich colors in the sage and brush in some of his desert scenes, even in deep shadow where the muted purples and yellows take on a subtle glow. His views of the rocky coastline are atmospheric and full of wonderful textures, as are his mountains and hillsides.

I hope he finds the time, amid his work schedule and painting excursions, to post more.