Hopefully you have created one or more works of your own art, so you can appreciate this entry. FRANK KELLY FREAS was one of the demi-gods of American art… if you don’t know who he was, now is your chance to learn…
Here is another topic that can go on forever; in fact, just covering the different types of media can fill an entire web site! You have traditional media, like pencil, ink, various flavors of paint (oils, acrylic, watercolor, etc.), carvings, statues, and even tapestries; and if you can forget the costumers, you haven’t been to a Con lately! Then there are computer artists; photoshopers and 3D renderers for posters and illustrations, modelers creating game characters, avatars, and environments, or the multimedia folks generating short or full length animations. And that’s before you get to the Film/TV industry, with stop-motion specialists, makeup artists, matt artists, animators, special effects artists, and the whole CG effects sub-industry. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; but for this time around, let’s start with a few of the classics.
FRANK KELLY FREAS won 11 Hugo awards for his artwork, and was the Artist Guest of Honor at TorCon3 (World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, 2003). On the side, he is an official NASA mission artist with works hanging in the Smithsonian, has done record album covers for bands like Queen, did the Mad Magazine covers from 1955-62, and a whole lot more.
Ed Emshwiller” was an abstract expressionist painter who created covers and interior illustrations for dozens of Fantasy and SciFi publications from 1951-79, including Analog, Galaxy and F&SF. Of his book covers, Heinlein’s Glory Road is my favorite. In the 60’s he began exploring multimedia in the form of film and video, and in 1979 released the ground-breaking three-minute 3-D computer animation Sunstone. That was also the year he became dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts, where he remained until his death in 1990.
FRANK FRAZETTA was the original Naked-Ladies-of-Fantasy artist, no matter what those Boris fans claim. He was James Dean with a paintbrush, Jack Kerouac on the road to other worlds, and he had the bike to get there. If you don’t recognize his name, visit his site; you WILL recognize his work.