It’s been awhile since I’ve posted any work by Scott Hansen. As usual I love these posters. You can tell that his style has evolved a little with the use of silhouettes and more simplistic, negative space compositions, but still beautifully vintage as always. I also love the last one with the split photographs. So inspiring!

And on goes my fascination with concept artists and matte painters. This example is from Jesse van Dijk, a concept artist from Amsterdam. This painting is from Project Indigo, a personal project depicting a vertical city “…situated on a huge pillar in a ‘cavity’ in the sea; possibly an inactive volcano crater…” Jesse shares his conceptual process and illustrates how inhabitants located towards the top of the city would be able to rely on natural light more so than those located lower who would need to use artificial light such as oil lamps. I love these kinds of details.

Again I’m inspired, and with my new Wacom and reading materials I’ve obtained through a coworker I’m now closer to actually exploring this style of art. I’ve even jotted down a couple of notes for a possible beginner project, but I’m still far from anything near this level of quality or even understanding what it takes to get to this point. Still, it’s fun to revisit the fundamentals of fine art, which I’ve allowed to grow stale over the years since college.

Martin Ansin’s work has a beautiful illustrative style as you can see in this detailed view of his Taming Light poster for “…a group exhibition featuring painting, photography and illustration inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick”.

I’m unclear as to what a “handdrawn audioresponsive video exploration” is, but that’s not stopping me from fully enjoying this beautiful video by Gwen Vanhee.

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

Yep. (via Minimal Mac).

Came across this wonderful blog yesterday that highlights concept art for mostly sci-fi aircraft and spaceship design. It’s fairly dense with inspirational content if you’re into this kind of work or genre. Makes me want that Wacom tablet that’s arriving next week even more now!

I used to do a fair amount of work in 3D before working at Springbox. My abilities as a 3D artist were limited, mostly focused on texturing, lighting, and rendering still shots, but the time I spent in the field was highly enjoyable and beneficial to me as a designer. During that time I would frequent CG artist forums such as CG Talk to get answers to questions, inspiration, etc and I was often drawn to the work of concept artists and matte painters. I quickly became intrigued by their methods.

For Our Entertainment

The majority of the work concept artists and matte painters create is for the entertainment industry. Concept artists work early on during the course of a film project to establish the story’s setting and style based on the ideas of the storytellers. They generally work in a loose, more painterly style and tend to churn out a vast amount of paintings for any given project. Concept artists have a masters understanding of perspective, which is vital in realizing the scale of the environments, vehicles, and characters they are illustrating.

Matte painters create massive digital paintings, mostly of environments, for use as backdrops in complex scenes. Their paintings are generally of scenes that would be either too costly to create physically or don’t exist in real-life. Their work is highly realistic and strongly leans on the understanding of composition. They leverage photographs and images of real objects, filling in the gaps with digital brushes and bringing all of these elements together as a collective whole through their strong understanding of light and shadow.

A Great Resource

Probably the best online resource for learning more about their techniques is The Gnomon Workshop. The Gnomon Workshop is the leading resource of training materials for digital artists of all kinds. You can find DVDs on matte painting, 3D animation, special effects, character design, etc. These DVDs are hosted by some of the best artists in the business. I recently discovered that almost all of the training sessions have sample clips that you can view online, which is a great way of getting a taste of what’s contained on the DVDs.

I’ll admit that I’ve never watched one of these DVDs, but I know people who have and they speak very highly of them. I’ve been tempted to buy a few mainly to learn more Photoshop techniques from some of my favorite digital artists and increase my understanding of concepts such as perspective. Speaking of favorite artists, here are a few concept artists and matter painters I greatly admire.

James Clyne

James Clyne is a concept artist and matte painter. You might recognize the top 2 images from the new Star Trek movie. I love the work he did on the Romulan ship (2nd image). The 3rd image is one of the ones he did for Transformers. James has worked on other films such as X-Men 3, War of the Worlds, Troy, and A.I. Here are his DVDs at The Gnomon Workshop.

Ryan Church

Ryan Church is a concept artist and has had a prolific career, specifically for his work on War of the Worlds and a couple of the Star Wars prequels. Ryan creates some amazing looking machines. Here are his DVDs at The Gnomon Workshop.

Dylan Cole

Dylan Cole is a matte painter, concept artist, and ridiculously talented. You can see from the images above that he’s worked on some high profile films such as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and Superman Returns, but has also worked on films such as Pirates of the Caribbean, I, Robot, and 310 to Yuma. Just check out his resume to see that he’s been very busy over the past few years. Here are his DVDs at The Gnomon Workshop.

Dusso

Yanick Dusseault, aka Dusso, is a matter painter. It’s hard to put into words how epic his paintings are. Everytime I see his work I’m blown away and wonder how in the world he does what he does. He’s worked on projects such as The Lord of the Rings, War of the Worlds, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. The bottom 3 images are panoramas of “Coruscant” from Star Wars and have to be seen in the higher resolution versions from his site to be fully appreciated. Here are his DVDs at The Gnomon Workshop.