Ming Fan (or “fanming” as he is sometimes credited) is a Chinese concept artist and illustrator based in Shanghai.

He specializes in environments — fantastical imaginary landscapes and cityscapes. He renders them in lavish detail, often creating compositions in which there is a primary focal point along with two or more secondary areas of interest that, if isolated, would make interesting compositions within themselves.

He never loses the coherent overall focus, however, and accentuates the powerful sense of scale in his images with a command of both linear and atmospheric perspective, as well as a knack for creating multiple planes of content at various distances from the observer.

His own website/blog is in Chinese, and unfortunately plays music and ads at you when you enter, so it’s easier to view his work in his CGHub gallery.

Once you click through a thumbnail to a bigger image, click again for the larger image in a pop-up. Once in the enlargement, you can click through other images with side arrows.

It’s good that he has provided larger images, as much of the delight in his work is in the imaginative details, texture, and the feeling of sweeping scale that he brings to his subjects.

Rather than show a greater number of example images above, I’ve chosen four and included a detail crop from each.

Tiago Hoisel is an illustrator and digital painter from Brazil. Hoisel works primarily in Photoshop to create his wildly exaggerated portrayals of people, famous and otherwise, as well as animals and other characters.

His caricatures, as stretched and loopy as they may be, are grounded in the tactile realism of detailed textures and firm control of light and shadow.

Though his own blog has not been updated recently, you can find galleries of his work on CGHub and CGSociety.

[Via Metafilter]

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.]

Long before the relatively recent advent of the iPad and the digital painting apps for it that have ushered in a new wave of “digital plein air painting”, some artists, myself included, were painting digitally from life using laptop computers and pressure sensitive tablets.

Most of these artists had backgrounds in other types of digital art — digital comics creation in my case, but for the majority of those of which I was aware, concept art, for which digital painting has become the standard medium. Examples would include, Nicholas “sparth” Bouvier, Robh Ruppel and Nick Pugh. (Many artists work on both digital platforms, and/or also work in plein air with traditional media, such as Erik Tiemens.)

Even now, despite the prevalence of ever more sophisticated iPad painting apps and styli (Apple’s insistence on showing artists doing iPad painting with their fingers is just marketing BS, it’s possible, but pointless), there are still many advantages to working on laptop with a tablet, as clunky as the setup may seem compared to the sleeker, lighter, all-in-one device.

For one thing the digital painting software for laptop and desktop computers is much more advanced than any iPad app, having had over 15 years to mature into professional level tools.

For another, the use of pressure sensitive tablets is a distinct advantage both in terms of the more natural drawing and painting application they provide and a degree of accuracy beyond that of the relatively clunky finger-sized iPad styli. (Whether the recent introduction of the Jot Touch pressure sensitive iPad stylus will change that remains to be seen.)

Another, often overlooked advantage is the two handed approach to digital painting and drawing available on a laptop — in which the non-drawing hand is free to simultaneously work modifier keys to switch tools, make adjustments, zoom and of course, undo, all of which requires stopping and tapping on the tablet.

It’s a matter of trade-offs then, lightness and ease of portability of the tablet vs. the stronger set of tools available for the laptop/pressure sensitive tablet combination.

A case in point for the latter is the personal work of concept artist Patrick Faulwetter, who I profiled in his professional capacity yesterday, and whose set of digital plein air paintings, done on an Apple laptop with a Wacom Bamboo pressure sensitive tablet, left me impressed enough to make them the subject of a separate post.

In addition to doing digital paintings on location in various places around his home in California, Faulwetter takes his digital painting tools on his travels to places like China, Istanbul and Greece, as well as other areas of the U.S.

His digital location sketches are striking in their handling of color, value and atmosphere. He also takes superb advantage of one of the strengths of digital location painting — the ability to work on location in low light conditions or at night, in situations that would be prohibitively awkward with traditional painting media, capturing nuances of twilight and nighttime color and light effects that a camera would easily miss.

Faulwetter also has a wonderful eye for the value and colors contrasts of dappled sunlight and the horizontal light of early morning or late afternoon.

Among his subjects, Faulwetter demonstrates the fondness for cars, ships, planes and related tech that was part of what drew him to concept art originally. In these, as well as his portrayals of city streets, highways overpasses, rock formations, parks and harbor scenes, you can see his economy of rendering, due in part to the speed of rendering made possible by the digital tools (one of which is a palette that never runs dry and always contains every color you’ve used in your current piece in the form of the eyedropper tool).

You can see a photo of Faulwetter sketching with his laptop and Bamboo tablet in a photo from his blog (image above, bottom).

Unfortunately, his blog is in one of those widgety Blogger templates that can be viewed in half a dozen ways, all of which, though graphically nice looking, are usability disasters. I found it easiest to use the “Classic” view, even though it’s one of those script driven arrangements that keeps loading more content in one long continous scroll, within which it is impossible to bookmark and return to a specific place (does anybody actually think these are a good idea?). Anyway, the interface issues are well worth dealing with for the delightful range and variety of Faulwetter’s sketches.

Those who are less familiar with digital painting may be tempted to think there is some digital “magic” that makes digital painting easier, but other than some of the advantages I’ve mentioned (for which there are also tradeoffs such as the lack of tactile feedback, etc.), I think you’ll find that most digital painters work in an approach similar to the preferred medium of many concept artists and illustrators prior to digital tools — gouache.

Those of us who enjoy drawing and painting digitally, either with a pressure sensitive tablet and stylus on a desktop computer, or with a capacitive stylus on an iPad (sorry, Apple, fingerpainting is for kids), are often frustrated with the disconnect between the two.

Most notable is the lack of pressure sensitivity on the iPad, leaving us constantly tapping to bring up adjustment controls to change opacity or line weight.

The Jot Touch Bluetooth pressure sensitive stylus for iPad by Adonit seeks to change that, encapsulating the pressure sensitivity into the stylus itself, and communicating that information to pressure aware apps via Bluetooth.

Though I can’t yet give you a personal review, there are several appearing around the net, particularly a nicely thorough video review (bottom two images above) by concept artist and animator I-Wei Huang, AKA Crab Fu.

The functionality of the stylus is limited to support incorporated into the painting and drawing apps, but many of the major titles are on board. More details in the reviews listed below.

The Jot Touch is about $100 (Available on Amazon).

[Via BoingBoing]

Andrew “Android” Jones has worked as a concept artist with companies like ILM and Nintendo, as well as Massive Black, which he co-founded. He was also co-founder of the popular ConceptArt.org community portal.

Jones is also a creator of visionary art, using a variety of digital tools involving digital painting, vectors and CGI modeling. He lists his primary tools as Painter, Photoshop, ZBrush and Alchemy.

He brings his skills in these areas to bear in complex, fascinatingly detailed visionary images — rich with patterns, textures, and imagery within imagery. These sometimes are stand alone pieces and sometimes serve as posters or music CD covers.

I particularly enjoy his blending of vector graphics and digital painting techniques, and his use of layered, almost fractal, repetition of design elements within the composition. He also uses digital blending modes to great effect, allowing his patterns and textures to be expressed against his painted forms.

The home page of his website serves as a blog and gallery of his latest work. There is also a portfolio section, a dedicated section for his Phadroid performance art projects and a store, which contains additional images not found in the other sections.

You can also find his work in the D’artiste: Concept Art collection

Simon Dominic (who you will sometimes see referred to as Simon Dominic Brewer) is an English illustrator and concept artist.

Like many contemporary concept artists and illustrators working in the science fiction and fantasy vein, Simon works digitally, painting his compositions in Corel Painter and Art Rage Studio Pro (see my 2011 review of Art Rage 3 Studio Pro).

He makes a point of using the “natural media” characteristics of those tools (which emulate the effects of traditional media like oil, gouache, watercolor, etc.) to give his work a more painterly feel.

Dominic has a wonderfully eccentric imagination, with creatures and characters that step outside of the expected stereotypes. He often works with constrained color palettes and sharp value contrasts to give his compositions visual drama, and also makes excellent use of texture and atmospheric perspective.

Dominic’s work has been featured in a number of collections of digital and fantasy art, such as the Exposé series, the Fantasy Art Now books and Digital Art Masters.

As a promotion for Volume 5 of Digital Art Masters, the publishers extracted a chapter showcasing Dominic’s how-to for one of his digital paintings and made it available as a PDF so potential readers could sample the book. As of this writing, it’s still available here (click on the “Free Chapter!” banner at the bottom of the main image).

There is a 2011 interview with Dominic on Inside the Artist’s Studio.

[Via Concept Art World]

If you stopped by Lines and Colors yesterday, January 18, you may have noticed that Lines and Colors had gone dark, along with a significant number of other sites, in protest, and to raise awareness of the “anti-piracy” internet censorship bills looming in the U.S. Congress.

If you didn’t happen to stop by yesterday, but would like to know more about why it matters, what I had to say about the issue, and why the continued existence of Lines and Colors and websites like it hinges on the defeat of these bills, here is the page that was up in place of the site yesterday.

The effort to raise awareness of this issue across the web has apparently begun to have an effect, as a number of legislators have withdrawn their support for the bills, at least in their current form. But the fight is far from over; the hugely powerful and influential lobbies that represent the entertainment industry will not slink quietly away and call it a day; they will continue to pressure congress to give them the kind of extraordinary and frightening control over internet content that these bills provide.

Those in other countries may feel this doesn’t affect them (it will if hundreds or thousands of websites go dark at the whim of the big corporations), or you may feel frustrated that you can’t affect it directly. Right now, the spread of information and awareness is important, and those of you in Europe and elsewhere will soon enough have your own fight on your hands over similar legislation that these companies are trying to force into law around the world.

Those in the U.S. can directly affect the immediate danger of these bills passing by calling or writing your U.S. senators and representatives and urging them to reject the bills. Here is a site called Stop American Censorship that has more information on how easy it is to do that.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that if these bills pass, Lines and Colors, and significant other portions of the web, will cease to exist.

-Charley