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)

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 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.

100 Photoshop Tutorials, subtitled “for creating beautiful art”, is a set of digital art how-to articles from numerous artists, collected and accessed through a large page of thumbnail images.

Somewhat confusingly, though the majority of them seem to be for 2-D digital painting, the site on which they are hosted is called “3D Total“. The site devotes space to both 3-D and 2-D digital art, however.

Hovering your mouse over the large thumbnail images on the 100 tutorial page produces a “tool tip” style floating box with some information about the tutorial by it’s creator. Unfortunately, this feature is a bit buggy in Safari, and the pop-up boxes often appear below the current screen when scrolling through the page. Browsing isn’t difficult, though, as the tutorial pages are fast loading, and you can get a good idea of the subject of each tutorial from the nature of the image.

Many are of digital painting techniques are for figures, environments, landscapes, and characters, and would be of particular interest to digital painters and concept artists.

The style and approach of the artists included offers a nice variety, and digital artists of differing interests are likely to find material relevant to their own preferences.

Most of the tutorials deal with the techniques involved in the creation of a specific image, and range from three to six pages in length. A good number of them seem to be from 2d Artist, the PDF-based online magazine devoted to digital art techniques.

[Link via Digg]

Goro Fujita was born in Japan, grew up in Germany and studied there at the German Film School, where he concentrated on 3-D character animation. He is now a freelance character animator and visual development artist.

The gallery on his site focuses mainly on his personal work. The section of finished work only contains 15 images. There are also sections for personal 3-D work and a nice sketchbook section with life drawings and quick sketches from life and imagination.

The real treasure on Fujita’s site, however, is the section of speedpaintings, meaning quickly done digital paintings. These are whimsical, imaginative and wonderfully realized in the spare, unfussed-with style inherent in speedpainting. They range across a wide variety of scenes and subjects and are sometimes hilarious (he has this thing for rabbits). In them he plays with color, composition, lighting and visual texture in ways that only free-ranging casual exploration is likely to bring out.

I have no idea how much relation any of them have to his professional work, and some are obviously playful interpretations of existing films, but a number of them are suggestive of intriguing ideas for stories.

There is a section of his short animations and a demo reel, as well as a section for tutorials, that includes tips and tricks for speedpainting, a painting screen capture and a “making of”s article about the most elaborate of the images in the Finished section, which was a Challenge entry for the CGSociety.

Fujita also has a blog, Chapter 56, in which he discusses his animation, paintings and various other topics.

[Link via Fossfor's Laboratory]

For some reason I haven’t been able to fathom, a lot of artists who work digitally in fantasy art or concept art seem to feel the need to go by pseudonyms, sometimes multiple ones.

Lorland Chen is alternately known as lorlandchain, Lorland Chain, Wei Chain and Wei Chen. I think one of the last two is actually his real name. Take your pick.

Chen is an illustrator from Chengdu China. He is also an instructor at the ChengDu Fine Art Academy.

Chen exhibits a fascinating range of influences. His sometimes intricate and elaborate compositions of fantasy themed works draw on Chinese mythology and history for their subject matter, but are painted in the traditions of Western art. Chen works in both traditional media like watercolor and in digital painting applications like Painter and Photoshop, and sometimes combinations of digital and traditional media.

His figures in flowing robes walk through fantasy palaces or enchanted forests amid great trees that sometimes show the influence classic American illustrators like Maxfield Parrish. There are nods to classical European painting and contemporary fantasy art alike.

His digital paintings are sometimes extensively detailed, giving the impression that Chen was just having so much fun rendering out the intricate bits that he didn’t want to stop.

Chen’s own site, though it has an English version and information about the artist, is difficult to recommend for viewing his work because the images are marred with watermarking. The site also has some technical problems (won’t stop trying to load in Safari) and plays unrequested music (and long time readers know how much I love that). Still, if you like Chen’s work, it’s worth checking out the info about his work and his self-published how-to book.

Fortunately, you can see a number of his images without the annoyance of watermarking on his gallery spaces on deviantArt and CGSociety, which are often accompanied by his comments on the works and his digital painting process.

[Link via startdrawing.org]

Aleksi Briclot is a Paris-based concept artist and art director for the gaming industry as well as an illustrator and comics artist.

His game credits include lead artist on ColdFear, a horror themed action game from DarkWorks and Ubisoft, Splinter Cell Double Agent and the new titles Haze from Ubisoft and Dungeon Runners from NCSoft.

He has done numerous illustrations for RPG books, magazines and comics, including covers for Mage, C.O.P.S. Rpgs, Privateer Press, and World of Warcraft, as well as an extensive series of paintings for the Wizards of the Coast card series Magic: the Gathering, Dreamblade.

His comics industry work includes the videogame adaptation Alone in the Dark 4, Spawn: Simony and the new Spawn graphic album Architects of Fear, as well as covers for Marvel’s Annihilation: Conquest series and the Hellgate limited series from Dark Horse. His comics interiors are in the fully painted approach rather than the traditional line and color method.

Briclot is also an instructor for the international ConceptArt/Massive Black workshops, and his work has been featured in several anthologies of digital and fantastic art, including being chosen for the back cover of the recent Spectrum 14.

Briclot is obviously a busy fellow and his web site hasn’t been updated for a long time. Though the home page is hung with apologetic notes that might give you the idea it’s closed until renovations can happen, it is in fact open and you can view his gallery of earlier work.

He is for the moment throwing more recent work up on his informal MySpace page. I’ve also found a few other resources and listed them for you below.

Briclot often works his fantasy and horror-themed compositions in swirls of form and suggested movement, at times almost in concentric rings. His flaming demons and maniacally grimacing monsters spin out at you, with their intense colors pushing them forward from muted low-chroma backgrounds, or brightly surge from haunted layers of darkness.

He also does terrific dragons, writhing and twisting, turning their spiky heads in imminent threat displays. His work for C.O.P.S. displays a science fiction edge that stands out a bit from his other work and would be interesting to see more of. All of his work utilizes texture to both give grit and substance to the images and to tie them together as a visual whole.

Briclot is also involved in a European artbook called Merlin in collaboration with artist Jean-Sebastien Rossbach (and possibly others, I’m not certain). The project is represented on MySpace as if it were Merlin’s own MySpace page.

Link Collector is just that, a well arranged collection of links to sites for illustrators, digital painters, concept artists, matte painters and comics artists.

The illustrators are primarily science fiction and fantasy, and there is an emphasis on concept art and digital painting. The category labeled “Traditional and Sculpture” seems to refer to traditional media, as opposed to digital, within the fantasy, science fiction and concept art genres, rather than to traditional genres of art. There is little in the way of sculpture yet, but I assume that will take the form of dimensional works in the science fiction and fantasy vein, similar to what one might encounter in the Spectrum collections.

There is a section of Art Resources, with links to other major collections of similar art and illustration, and a growing blogroll. Unlike most blogrolls, which are essentially just lists of links, the listings here, like the listings in the other categories, are accompanied by a short, succinct description of the site and a representative slice of image or a logo, making them much more useful than non-annotated links.

The Link Collector was put together by Leonid Kozienko as part of his Leoartz site; which includes links to his portfolio of digital painting on CGPortfolio as well as his blog. The very brief bio on the CGPortfoio site lists Kozienko’s experience as concept design and illustration for videogames and film. Most of the pieces in the portfolio seem to be experiments and playful interpretations of images from films. The blog is in Russian, but the titles, interestingly enough, are in English; and the images, of course, are independent of language.

Link Collector is available in either English or Russian, and can be toggled between the two with a link at the top. The link I’ve given here is to the English version.

Note: I should give my customary warnings that Link Collector contains links to some NSFW material; and can be a major time sink. Have fun.

James Paick is a concept artist for the gaming industry, working out of Los Angeles and is a graduate of Art Center College of Design.

Beyond that I know little, as his blog and web site don’t offer much in the way of biographical info, client lists or project credits.

I do know, however, that there are enough of his images online to get a good feeling for his work, which is atmospheric, full of artfully suggested details and often employs a limited palette to focus attention to the important parts of a composition.

Paick appears to work primarily digitally, but there is a nice section of traditional media sketches on his web site. The largest section in his online gallery is the environments section of the entertainment gallery.

Paick has a sketchblog called scribble pad and is a contributor to the joint blog clockwork, along with Stephen Chang, Eric Chiang, Steve Chon and Eric Ryan. He also has a portfolio on CGSociety.