Arnie Fenner, co-founder and editor of the Spectrum collections of fantastic art, has written an article for Tor.com titled Lovecraft, Asimov, GRRM, Heinlein & More: Painting SFF Writers in which he collects some portraits of fantasy and science fiction authors by a number of artists.

Covering authors in the genre as far as Mark Twain (think Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court) the portraits are in a variety of media and styles, but all by outstanding artists.

Incidentally, the Tor.com site has a terrific gallery of fantasy and science fiction illustrators (major time sink warning).

(Images above: H.P. Lovecraft by Virgil Finlay, Robert A. Heinlein by Donato Giancola, Edgar Allen Poe by Michael J. Deas, Harlan Ellison by Iain McCaig, Jules Verne by Mark Summers, Mark Twain by Gregory Manchess.)

David Fuhrer is a Swiss concept artist, illustrator and designer based in Bern. His website showcases a range of his illustration, design and other images, both fanciful personal projects and more practical work for clients.

When visiting his site you can choose between Flash or HTML versions, but in either case, open your browser to full screen as the images scale up with the window, and Fuhrer’s digital paintings are intricately detailed and work on an expansive range of scale.

In both his freeform constructions in which fantastic landscape elements seem to melt and grow in wildly sculptural shapes and his glistening space scenes in which the lights of technological elements dot oddly shaped planes and structures, Fuhrer uses detail to convey a dramatic sense of scale.

I’ve tried to show this with detail crops accompanying each of the images above. Viewing them in large size on his site, however, gives a much better effect.

Fuhrer also has a gallery on Behance Network that includes work not currently on his site.

[Via io9]

Art Out Loud 7 is the latest in a series of group demonstrations by well known illustrators at the Society of Illustrators in New York.

Art Out Loud 7 takes place on Saturday, September 24, 2011 from 1 to 5pm.

Participating artists for this event are Donato Giancola, Greg Manchess, Rick Berry, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (images above in that order, links are to artists’ websites).

Tickets are $40 for Members, $50 Non-Members and $20 Students; more information here.

I just love these. Not only do I take great delight in past visions of the future, I’m particularly fond of retro space art.

The blog Dark Roasted Blend, which posts items that are odd, amusing, visually interesting — or all three, has posted a fine addition to their wonderful series of posts collecting visions of future space tech from the past, notably the 1930′s through the 1960′s.

The posts are a cornucopia of art deco streamlined spaceships, giant wheeled space stations, beautifully clunky spacesuits and rocketships with fins that would make a 1959 Cadillac turn green with envy.

Is it the future yet?

(Please see the original articles for links to the image credits.)

[Via BibliOdyssey]

I was sorry to hear that Jeffrey Catherine Jones died yesterday at the age of 67.

Jones, As I reported in my brief 2006 post, was an influential fantasy artist and illustrator who also did comics and gallery art.

Part of The Studio, a renowned group of illustrators and comics artists in the 1970′s that included Barry Windsor-Smith, Berni Wrightson and Michael William Kaluta, Jones had been called “the greatest living painter” by Frank Frazetta.

Jones helped introduce classical art themes into comics, but was primarily known for her atmospheric, painterly and wonderfully textural paintings for fantasy book covers.

There are a couple of collections of Jones’ work that appear to be out of print, but can be found used: The Art of Jeffrey Jones, Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art and Age of Innocence: The Romantic Art of Jeffrey Jones. There is also a Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook, which is more readily available.

Maria Cabardo has been working on a film about Jones’ life and art titled Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Her studio, MaCab films, initiated a Kickstarter project to fund the film but it fell short. I believe they are still soliciting donations directly, though I don’t know the current status of the project. There is another clip here.

There is a nice tribute to Jones on the Muddy Colors blog.

Designing imaginary creatures takes more than just drawing or painting skills; good creatures, to my mind, require imagination and originality, or they seem like everybody else’s creatures.

Mike Corriero does terrific creatures.

Corriero is a freelance concept artist and illustrator for the gaming and film industries. His clients include Radical Entertainment/Vivendi Universal Games, Challenge Games, Liquid Development, Piazo Publishing and Hasbro Inc. You can find a list of some of the projects he’s worked on, as well as publications in which his work has been featured in the Resume on his website, and the bio on CGHub, which also features a quickly accessed gallery of his work.

In the gallery on his own website, there are sections for Sketches, and finished Illustration and Concept art. When viewing the images, there is an “Enlarge” button above the main image that launches a much larger version (in most cases) in a new window.

There you can find his imaginative creatures and monsters, with multiple appendages, wild textures and strange shapes, and often painted with a touch for incorporating a range of colors into his renderings. You can also find environments and other illustrations.

Corriero works both digitally and in traditional media. There is a bit of information about his process in the FAQ on his site, and there are some process videos on Livestream.

Corriero has collected a number of his sketches in a book called Planet to Planet: Creatures and Strange Worlds, available from Lulu, and also has posters and prints available through Zazzle.

You can find more information about his work and projects on his blog.

Robh Ruppel is a well known art director, concept artist, character designer and matte painter for the film and gaming industries.

He was the Art Director for the animated feature films Meet the Robinsons and Brother Bear and did visual development work on films like Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Tarzan, Mulan and The Emperor’s New Groove. He is currently an art director and visual development artist for Naughty Dog, a gaming development studio in California.

Since I wrote a post about his work back in 2006, Ruppel has revised and expanded his website, maintained his Broadview Graphics site and continued to add to his now extensive blog, The Broadview Blog.

The galleries on his website are only identified by number until you click into them. The first few are concept art, matte painting, animation and color keys. I enjoy his colorful, atmospheric work on the Meet the Robinsons in particular (images above, top two).

Gallery 8 consists of sketches, largely in a science fiction vein (image above, third down), and Gallery 10 is fantasy art (from somewhat earlier in his career, I think).

Long before the current spate of iPad location painters, Ruppel, along with a few other concept artists like Nicolas Bouvier (“Sparth“), was an early practitioner of digital plein air painting, taking a laptop and Wacom tablet on location to paint from life in applicaitons like Painter and Photoshop.

Now, of course, he’s taking advantage of the much more manageable digital location painting process afforded by the iPad, using apps like Inspire Pro, and iPhone, using Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile.

Gallery 9 on the website is his gallery of Digital Plein Aire (images above, bottom three).

I particularly enjoy his on location digital paintings of room interiors, such as his Vermeer-like painting of a doorway shown above, bottom.

There is a new collection of Ruppels’ work titled Aspect Ratio, available from Gallery Nucleus. It features some of his digital plein air paintings as well as his science fiction themed art. You can see a review/preview of the book on Parka Blogs. Ruppel’s professional work is also featured in The Art of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Parka Blogs’ review here).

There is a nicely illustrated interview with Ruppel on CGSociety. There is also an interview with Ruppel on his use of Google SketchUp in Game Design, which includes more shots of his concept design work.

Sean Andrew Murray, AKA “Muttonhead”, is a concept artist and illustrator currently working with Big Huge Games/38 Studios. He has previously worked with Turbine on “Dungeons and Dragons Online” and “Lord of the Rings Online”, as well as clients like Privateer Press and Wizards of the Coast.

Murray often likes to work in an ink line and filled color approach as opposed to the digital painting styles more common in the field. That, and his predilections for quirky subjects and settings, can give his work the feeling of slightly twisted children’s book illustration.

He has a nicely imaginative, sometimes enjoyably grotesque approach to character design, and a knack for illustrating environment concepts in a way that gives them some of the feeling of weirdly intricate set designs.

His website is divided into Paintings, Drawings and Concept Art and Illustration. In the Drawings section you will often find preliminary drawings for some of the pieces you’ll see in the other sections. You can also fine preliminary drawings along with works in progress and other pieces on Murray’s blog.

Murray works in both traditional and digital media and you can also find a gallery of his work on CGHub. His sketchbook drawings were the subject of a feature article in ImagineFX #34, there is an extract on Murray’s blog.