Best Fantasy Drawings

Youve gptta include Frank Frazetta as one of the masters in the genre. He does a job like a pre Rphealite painter but manages to imbue thepaintings with real action. Even a nude like that below seems to be doing something rather than just posing. One of the reasons I hate MAng is that they ignore "Painterliness"

Vallejo was always a favorite.

Vallejo lives not too far away in Allentown Pa. My only problem with his sharp focus stuff is that he has recycled a lot of his old works by digital mans, so youll se a lot of his later stuff with annoyingly similar backgrounds and even his "support" animals.


Hes been compared to Frazetta in style and topics. Frazetta did it
first.

It the play Abigail's Party by Mike Leigh there is a heated discussion on whether Wings of Love by Stephen Pearson is great art or pretentious pseudo porn.

Vallejo (and Julie Bell, they work together) iconography is more hetero-erotic, while Frazetta is more into muscular Conan types. But I agree Frazetta is a better artist.

There are a few big names on our side of the pound too. Two who come to mind:

Luis Royo in the classic fantasy-erotic genre:


Philippe Druillet -here is one of his renditions of the Barbarian meme: hard to do more fantastic than that -he doesn't do cute girls:

I agree. Frank Frazetta's stuff is amazing. I bought a glossy book featuring Frazetta back in the early 80's, and am still amazed at the man's talent.

Just try googling Frank Frazetta and click 'images' to see what comes up.

Here's your favorite.

This has gone a bit comic booky, so here's my favourite.

I cannot believe that this got a NSFW badge. What the hell is this all about?

pseudo-porn.

my first exposure to the genre was John Norman's Gor novels...

Boobies.

Howbout this ?

I like that Druillet stuff, looks almost like woodblock

We like Bell's work as a wildlife artist even more than her own fntsy stuff.

Bell's work is too 'pretty' for my taste. Vallejo brings her palette more to the dark side. Not enough though, it remains 'cute'... Druillet is the best if you like it dark and a tad crazy. He does 'comics' if you can use that word, closer to illustration/art that your regular comics though. His illustration of Salammbô by Flaubert is out of this world, in more ways than one. "La Nuit" is another great piece.

His 'woodwork' aspect is just China ink in the old fumetti/comics/BD tradition, were color is applied later by airbrush, brush or just in solid color fills. Often the colors are done by another artist in that tradition.

Another decent French scifi illustrator is Jean Giraud aka Moebius.

Fantasy art is one of the most prolific fields in representational art. There has always been work, if for no other reason than pulp fiction magazines and comic books. Frazetta and others got a lot of work that way, which helps to buy the beans while you dp other things.

It is also one of the fastest growing fields--it's hard to keep track of all the established artists and the newcomers. Here's just a few of ones with whom i am familiar, and they are probably now to be considered "from days gone by:"



Keith Parkinson



Greg and Tim Hildebrandt

(They did a lot of Tolkien themes--here, Ghan-Buri-Ghan meets with King Theoden.)



Clyde Caldwell

I think the erotic component is a product of the early pulp magazine days.

Im familiar with Moebius. The work gets kinda close to Manga so my view is stated above.
Ive been looking more and more at the Druillet stuff and am impressed with the color printing. It gives n impression of multiple color blocks or separate silk screens.

Heres the NO 1 cover of the Brit magazine that set the stage for the meld of comics and story. Notice how this cover is multiple color separation technique (this was 1946). LAter stuff used multilith which could reproduce subtle color tones .

One of the early msters of the separation color covers was L B Cole. He did thousands of early Horror comic covers (preceded the EC comics and the "comics Code" regs). If you look up his work youll see the color separations he used relied heavily upon yellows and reds. This cover is from the late 40's so it has that old school look.