Felix Yoon is a visual development artist and illustrator who has worked at Dreamworks Animation.

On his website you can find examples of his concept art, color keys and characters, as well as personal work.

There is an additional gallery on Concept Art World.

When Yoon was a student at the Art Center College of Design, he was a contributor to The Skillful Huntsman book project (see my post on The Skillful Huntsman).

Edwin Rhemrev is a visual development artist based in the Nertherlands who works in the fields of gaming and theme park design.

His website has galleries of his work in sections for environments and characters, as well as a sketchbook. Rhemrev also maintains a blog on which you can find works in progress, news of upcoming projects, and more annotation to the images than you will find on the website.

Rhemrev’s drawings and sketches have that wonderful springy, loose kind of style you often encounter in good visual development artists, with a lot of freedom and action on top of a solid foundation of draftsmanship.

Some of his color work is bright and energetic, while much is subdued and moody, and often rendered very effectively in monochrome.

As I frequently find with concept and visual development artists, some of my favorite pieces are among Rhemrev’s personal projects, where he can let his imagination roam with out the constraints of client requirements.

These include his fun take on the thought of what a hypothetical sequel to The Incredibles might look like (images above fourth from bottom).

I also particularly enjoy his digital plein air sketches of locations in The Hague (above, bottom two).

The link between movies and comics is a strong one. Even without the obvious bridge of their wonderful merging in animation, they share numerous qualities.

Both are visual storytelling mediums, and share a common concern with establishing shots, close-ups, framing a scene, conveying the spatial relationship of characters one to the other and other elements of essential visual continuity from scene to scene.

Both involve the element of time and of visual compositions that change over time.

Both have a “director’s” viewpoint, and the impact of choices of lighting, contrast and visual mood cannot be understated in the effectiveness with which a story is told.

Storyboards, which are used to plan movies, television and animation, are in essence a from of comics.

It’s not surprising then that there is crossover between the two fields; a number of comics artists and writers have moved into the fields of film and television and visual development artists have ventured into comics.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre, who I have profiled previously, has moved back and forth — he started as a comics artist for newspapers in his native Spain, moved into production design for animation and is currently a visual development artist working at Dreamworks.

In his excellent book, Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers, which I reviewed here, he applied his expertise in both fields to create a superb framework for narrative illustration.

In his new book, Trail of Steel – 1441 A.D., Mateu-Mestre places those skills in the service of a graphic story about mercenary soldiers in 15th century Spain. The artist provided me with a review copy.

The storytelling, as you would expect, is dramatically cinematic, conveyed in Mateu-Mestre’s wonderfully fluid drawing style. He has an uncanny ability to combine precision draftsmanship and free, energetic rendering. I’ve spoken before about the delight I take in his drawing style.

The real highlight for me, however, is his mastery of tone. To say that the drawings are in black and white and grays is to miss the point. Here is a story told in both subtle and dramatic value contrasts that would not have been as effective if rendered any other way.

Mateu-Mestre uses value here in much the way skilled film directors use black and white film in many classic movies, creating a mood and atmosphere that would actually be difficult to achieve in color. These are images in which color would be a distraction and actually lessen the impact.

He has posted some images from the book on his blog in which he plays with the application of subtle colors to some of the pages (images above, second from bottom). As much as I like them as images and interesting experiments, I much prefer the panels as presented in the book.

Even though this is a story, students of comics (and visual storytelling in general) could consider Trail of Steel effective as a continuation of the lessons in Framed Ink — a textbook use of cinematic comics storytelling and the application of light and dark in narrative illustration.

The book is appended with a few notes on process, preliminary drawings and thumbnail page layouts. It is available as both a European style hardcover album (the best format for comics, IMHO) and a trade paperback.

You can find more mentions of the book on Mateu-Mestre’s blog, along with more of his visual development work, including some beautiful tone and color images from his work on Puss In Boots.

Hovig Alahaidoyan is a UK concept and visual development artist and designer for games and film.

Though his blog is not extensive, and his portfolio is available only as a PDF, Alahaidoyan recently participated in Under Tomorrows Sky, in which he helped bring to life the visualization of a future city as conceptualized by a think tank of scientists, technologists, futurists and other artists (images above, top three sets of images and detail crops).

The site for the project has large images of the work he contributed (and here).

The large images for that project show Alahaidoyan’s skill at simultaneously conveying scenes of huge scale and the human scale in which people exist in relation to those scenes.

[Via Popular Science]

Cliff Childs is a concept artist and illustrator based in Los Angeles. He studied at the Otis College of Art and Design and is, I believe, currently working with Sony Computer Entertainment America.

Childs has an approach to concept environments that stresses atmosphere, both in the sense of atmospheric perspective and in terms of mood. Even in his renderings of daylight scenes, he plays with visual sensations of moisture laden air, giving his designs a palpable feeling of distance and temperature.

He also works his lighting in a theatrical manner, focusing attention with spotlighted effects, controlled passages of color and suggestions of texture.

In addition to his concept work, Childs has done illustrations for the Magic: The Gathering gaming card series.

I didn’t see any of the latter on his blog, but you will find a lot of his concept and personal work, including sketches from life in traditional media.

Childs’s work is on display as one of the artists represented in the Painting in Pixels: An Exhibition of Concept Art currently at the Riverside Art Museum (see my recent post).

Concept art has become essential to the entertainment industry. Conceptually envisioning scenes before they’re created has evolved as a key part of a production process that often involves computer generated imagery or compositing.

For those of us who love the genre — which can combine some of the best aspects of painted sketches, finished illustration, fantasy art, landscape painting, character sketches and vehicle rendering — concept art has become increasingly available on the web.

You will find it on the websites and blogs of many artists in the field and in “portals” or group galleries devoted to computer art, as well as associated with promotional material for some films and games. You may also encounter concept art as part of the “special features” included with some DVDs and game modules.

It’s rare, however, to find concept art for movies or film as the subject of museum exhibitions.

For one thing, the genre is not one in which the image is intended for finished display as an art piece, but is instead a means to an end, providing a foundation for the final game or movie in somewhat the way preliminary drawings are created for paintings.

For another thing, a large percentage of concept art is created digitally, taking advantage of the extreme plasticity of the digital painting medium to accommodate changes, revisions and alternate versions in the planning stage of a feature. Digital painting must printed out in a form suitable for gallery or museum display (usually as Giclée prints).

It’s a rare treat, then, that the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California has opened a new exhibition, Painting in Pixels, An Exhibition of Concept Art, that features work from some of the top names in the field.

The museum has a modest selection of some of the pieces in the exhibit on their website, but like most museum previews misses the chance to use a more extensive display of larger images to generate interest in the show.

In lieu of a better online preview, I’ll point you to some of my previous Lines and Colors posts on a number of the artists in the exhibition (listed below). These include links to the artist’s websites and blogs as well as online group galleries and other resources. (This is not a complete list of artists in the exhibition, just some of those about whom I’ve previously written.)

You could also, of course, refer to the list of artists on the museum’s page for the exhibit and search for their sites and blogs.

Painting in Pixels, An Exhibition of Concept Art is on display until January 10, 2013.

(Images above: Jaime Jones, Tyler West, Thierry Doizon (aka barontieri), Scott Robertson, Mike Yamada, Cecil Kim, Thom Tenery)

[Addendum: One of the exhibitions co-curators, Thomas Brillante, has been kind enough to supply me with a list of websites and blogs for the artists in the show. The list in itself is a cornucopia of concept art resources. I've added it below.]

Björn Hurri is a concept artist working in the gaming industry, He has worked for companies like NCsoft, Catalyst Game Labs and SEGA and is currently the Lead Artist for Opus Artz, a production design agency based in London.

When I wrote about his work back in 2008, I highlighted his fun and, at the time, lightly sketched illustrations for steam punk versions of characters from Star Wars.

Since then, Hurri has expanded the project into a longer series of more finished illustrations (image above, top), with more elaborate interpretations of the characters.

His other work for gaming projects ranges from historical through science fiction subjects, and frequently displays Hurri’s skill at conveying texture and atmosphere.

I particularly enjoy his playful take on John Bauer’s wonderful big-nosed trolls (above, bottom).

Though his website is currently unavailable, you can find a portfolio of his work, along with some relevant information about the artist, on CGHub.

Hurri is also a contributor to the Gorilla Artfare group blog.

Originally from Germany, Patrick Faulwetter is a concept artist who started with an interest in architecture that then then shifted into automotive design and led him to work with the Volkswagen and Audi Design Center in California.

He later moved into concept design for the entertainment industry, and his film credits include Priest, GI Joe 2: Retaliation and Bryan Singer’s Jack and the Giant Killer and his clients include Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Rythm and Hues and Imagi.

His website showcases his professional work and is divided into sections for Design, Environments, Concept and design challenges. The Environments section is the one in which you will find the most images (note the small link below the thumbnails to the second page).

Faulwetter has a wonderful faculty for conveying scale and atmospheric perspective, as well as superb control of limited palettes and dramatic lighting.

Faulwetter also maintains a blog called Sketchpat, on which he has posted some concept sketches, but his most recent posts, and the majority of the images on the blog, are digital location paintings, painted en plein on a laptop computer with a small pressure sensitive tablet.

I was going to include someof his digital location sketches here, but I was so impressed with them that I decided to make them the subject of a separate post.