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)

I had the pleasure Friday of attending a reading at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia by fantasy author Gregory Frost. Frost did an excellent reading, with just the right degree of theatricality, from his new book Shadowbridge. The book is based on a fascinating concept involving stories within stories, and is played out on a fantastic world with few large land masses in which life unfolds on a sprawling and complex system of enormous bridges.

The task of representing these bridges on the book’s cover fell to German illustrator Thomas Thiemeyer, who, according to Frost, did a superb job of capturing and conveying his vision of the Shadowbridge world.

You can see Thiemeyer’s oil on Masonite painting for the wrap-around Shadowbridge cover (image above, with detail, below) in more detail on his web site, along with preliminary sketches and the front of the finished cover.

Frost’s Shadowbridge is a two part story; the second book, Lord Tophet, is due out in July. Thiemeyer has also done a dramatic painting for that book’s wrap-around cover, envisioning this world-spanning bridge system from the underside, which you can see here.

Theimeyer has a knack for taking on subjects on a grand scale, envisioning alien worlds with dazzling geography, towering cliffs, bizarre animals, wonderfully sleek futuristic cities and beautifully textured combinations of medieval and classical architecture.

When browsing through his online galleries, don’t be put off by the somewhat awkward arrangement that often sends you to pages of images you’ve seen before; some of the images you haven’t seen by that point will be worth your perseverance, with eyebrow-lifting vistas of beautifully imagined worlds lurking just under the next link.

Thiemeyer works both in oil and digitally, sometimes combining the two techniques in the same image. He has a subtle command of color, particularly in scenes at dusk in which the fading light of early evening mingles with pools of artificial illumination or fire. He displays remarkable finesse when portraying the the textures of rock, sand, cliffs and mountains; perhaps a side benefit of his joint study of art and geology in college.

His illustration clients include HarperCollins, Random House, Heyne, Arena and Wizards of the Coast; and his work has been in several of the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art.

Thiemeyer is also an author in addition to being an artist, and has penned several high-selling novels, including Medusa, Reptillia and Magma.

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]

After studying as several colleges, including the School of Visual Arts and the New York Academy of Figurative Art, fantasy artist Alan Pollack decided to focus on illustrations for role playing game companies.

He worked for a while for TSR, the company responsible for Dungeons and Dragons, and has since gone freelance, adding companies like Del-Rey, ROC, Tor Books and Wizards of the Coast to his client list, book covers to his ouevre and science fiction subjects to his subject matter.

His web site galleries include role playing game art, collectable card game art, unpublished art, book covers and available originals. Though he applies his detailed realist style to each genre with equal aplomb, it is the book cover art I find most appealing, particularly in cases where he plays with areas of color as compositional elements, as in the image above, Memory of Fire.

Most of his paintings are in oil on illustration board and are sometimes done at a fairly large size (30″x40″, 76×100cm).

Pollack seems to have a fun sense of the lineage of classic science fiction and fantasy illustration that developed out of pulp illustration of the early to mid 20th Century, and cites his early fascination with somewhat more modern influences such as Frazetta, Boris, the Hildebrandt Brothers and Michael Whelan, and the later discovery of artists like Brom, Keith Parkinson, Robh Ruppel and Donato Giancola.

For me, one of the most appealing factors in Pollack’s work is his sense of fun. You get the impression he is having a blast painting the kind of subjects he grew up fascinated with, and that enthusiasm comes through in the finished paintings.

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.

I usually don’t write about artists whose online work is watermarked, as it often makes the display of the work pointless, but if the watermarking doesn’t deface the art too dramatically, and the artist is interesting enough, I’ll make exceptions.

I’ve seen a lot of imaginative and well-painted illustration over time for the collectable card game Magic: The Gathering from Wizards of the Coast, but Jim Murray’s pieces for the series stand out for their overt sense of playfulness and fun.

In addition to his more direct pieces, in which his paint handling and drawing skill are evident, are lots of images of gnarly, grotesque monsters, weirdling characters, bizarre environments and a parade of off-the-wall elves, wizards, warriors and animals painted with a sense of humor, outrageously over-the-top color, hugely fun, cartoon-like exaggerations of form, and a fevered imagination.

Murray obviously has a sharp ability to draw and paint realistically when inclined, but he prefers to let himself go wild, pulling his human and animal forms into taffy-like stretches, exaggerating motion, and rendering fanged and clawed beasties with a verve that makes them seem ready to jump out at you.

Murray generally works in acrylic on illustration board or watercolor paper. His online galleries include the aforementioned illustrations for Magic; covers for U.K comics like Judge Dredd and American Comics like Batman, where his exaggerated characters and colors at times put me in mind of Simon Bisley’s over-the-top comics work; art for gaming companies and a sampling of an independent comics project, co-created with Robbie Morrison.

There are also 1024×768 wallpapers of some of his pieces, links and a brief bio.

Murray lives and works in Montreal, where he apparently has lots of fun working on his projects.

[Link via The Art Department]

There are a number of science fiction and fantasy artists who will acknowledge their study of old master painting techniques and tell how it has influenced their work; there are few, however, whose work demonstrates that heritage as visibly as Donato Giancola.

Giancola is one of the finest science fiction and fantasy artists working in the field today, and to my mind, one of the best in the history of the genre. His extensive list of honors and awards, including multiple Chesley’s, Spectrum Gold and Silver Medals, World Fantasy Awards for Best Artist, the 2006 and 2007 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist, First Place in the Figurative category of the First International Art Renewal Center Open Salon and recognition in this year’s ARC event, indicates that not only do his contemporary artists and editors agree, but he is receiving notice in realist art circles at large. And well he should; Giancola is a terrific painter by any standard.

When I first wrote about Donato Giancola back in 2005, his web site was fairly well developed, but since then it has been expanded considerably, even if the appearance of the site hasn’t changed a great deal.

Giancola has added many new and larger images, and some paintings are accompanied by supplementary images of preliminary drawings, painted sketches and even works in progress on the easel.

Giancola’s excellent draftsmanship, graceful compositions and dramatic but refined use of color make his work a joy to look at. His blending and application of color in particular is exceptional, both in the overall composition and within the detailed rendering of individual subjects, particularly in in the portrayal of figures and faces. There his use of greens and multiple red hues give the sense of the varied and veinous character of caucasian skin found in Renaissance and Baroque painting.

He wears some of his other classical influences on his sleeve as well. His figures are painted with a chiaroscuro and drama inspired by Caravaggio and color and dynamism inherited from a study of Rubens. Some of his historical images reflect the influence of great illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. Most of all, though, Giancola seems enthralled with the painting mastery of Valezquez. (If you’re going to learn, learn from the best.)

Whether painting gleaming robots, intricate spaceship cockpits, towering dragons or armored warriors, Giancola’s study of old master painting gives his wildly imaginative fantasy and science fiction subjects a force and gravitas that is uncommon not only for the genre, but in contemporary illustration in general.

His site includes extensive galleries of science fiction and fantasy illustration, work done for the Magic: The Gathering collectable card game and a selection of concept art as well as a section of very nice life drawings. Unfortunately the latter two are hampered by one those annoying navigation schemes that require you to hover your mouse over little squares to view the images instead of simply clicking on them; but hey, I’ll take whatever Giancola art I can get.

The site also includes a section on technique that includes a discussion of his palette, a brief step-through of the editorial illustration process, a discussion of influences and a few step-through painting sequences (again with the roll-over dots navigation, but I’m picking nits).

In addition there is a Bio, a FAQ and a section of books, prints, card proofs and original art for sale.

The News section indicates that Giancola will be participating, along with Dan Dos Santos, Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Scott Fisher, Rebecca Guay and Greg Manchess, in a week-long Illustration Master Class to be held in Amherst, MA from June 16-22, 2008. (If you’re interested, act soon; attendance is limited to 90.) Special guest for the event will be Tor/Forge/Starscape Books art director extraordinaire Irene Gallo, whose informative and fascinating blog The Art Department features several mentions of Giancola.

Basil Gogos is a master of monsters.

I tend to think of him as a post-pulp pulp artist. He got to paint wonderfully lurid illustrations of famous movie monsters years after the high-period for pulp art had closed.

His delightfully ghastly portraits of Dracula, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, The Metaluna Mutant, The Wolf Man and dozens of other creatures that crawled out of Hollywood’s “B” movie dungeons in the middle of the 20th Century graced the covers of issue after issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Not the least of them was Frankenstein’s monster, who Gogos portrayed numerous times and in a multitude of approaches, from horrific to sympathetic.

Famous Monsters of Filmland was edited by monster expert extraordinaire Forrest J. Ackerman and published by James Warren. Warren also published Creepy and Eerie, black and white comics magazines that featured some of amazing artists like Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Berni Wrightson, Alex Toth and others. Gogos did covers for some of those and a range of other magazines as well.

Gogos studied at The National School of Design, The School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under the renowned illustrator and teacher Frank J. Reilly.

Gogo’s monster images are foot-off-the-brakes, no-color-barred excursions into monsteriffic sensationalism, with wonderful spooky spotlighting, eerie backlighting and great blocks of shadow defining the forms. Glaring colors wash over the looming faces like intense stage lighting, and the characters jump out at you as if screaming “Kid, you better buy this magazine if you want to see more cool stuff like this!”. Wonderful.

Gogos’ creepy creations and eerie evocations of monsters made famous in films have been collected in a new book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos, edited by illustrator Kerry Gammil and J. David Spurlok and with an foreword by Rob Zombie. (Gogos also did some album covers for Rob Zombie, The Misfits and Electric Frankenstein.)

The official Basil Gogos site is pretty minimal and the images are small, there are some larger ones in this page on Gathering Darkness.

Enjoy them…, if you dare!

Kinuko Y. Craft takes inspiration from many strata of the history of art and weaves them together into her own intricate and varied images of fantasy worlds; and isn’t afraid to let the threads keep their connection to the original sources of inspiration.

Looking through a gallery of her work, you’ll find a fascinating display of her interest in the styles and techniques of the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, Da Vinci and other Renaissance painters, Baroque portraits, the Orientalists, 19th Century Academics and some of the great Golden Age illustrators who took inspiration in many of the same sources.

At times she will playfully create a homage to a particular artist or period style, at other times she can fascinatingly intertwine several seemingly disparate sources into an uncanny whole (Henri Roussau and Titian in the same image for example).

Craft is well known as a fantasy oriented illustrator and her clients include National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, The New York Times, and Atlantic Monthly in addition to numerous publishers and commercial accounts. She has received multiple Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators, and several Chesley Awards.

Craft has transitioned away from the demands of editorial illustration and now concentrates on her own themes, and has a successful line of reproductions and art prints that have a wide following. I believe she also continues to work on a line of children’s books in which classic fairy tales like Cinderella, King Midas and Sleeping Beauty are retold.

Her approach varies from elaborate panoramas on which she has lavished intricate detail, to quiet and emotionally focused images of single subjects, with colors alternately subdued or intense.

The image gallery on her site is unfortunately not as extensive as you might like, but it is still a fascinating stroll through not only her own fertile imagination, but also through her fascinations with great artists of the past.

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]