This is the first preview of Art, a growing series for albertchessa.com. Music began with Primus; Art will begin with Yoshitaka Amano. Each artist below will eventually receive an article of their own, with room to look at individual works, follow their processes and consider how their images acquire a life beyond the projects for which they were made. These short introductions mark the starting points.
This series will eventually bring together 101 artists. Each of Quantumyth's 101 stories is a tribute to one of these people. I will reveal their names as the collection grows, leaving readers to decide for themselves which story honours which artist.
The boundaries between my series are gentle. Pillars includes artists, but approaches people whose influence on me extends across several creative disciplines: Tolkien, George Lucas, Matt Nava and Mike Mignola, for example. Here, the attention falls on visual practice itself, whether illustration, painting, printmaking, concept design or sculpture. That emphasis allows a musician such as John Dyer Baizley to appear through his pictures, and sculptors such as Beth Cavener and Rafael Grassetti to sit alongside illustrators. There is room for overlap.
As with all my lists, these names appear in no particular order. Beginning with Amano establishes a starting point, without ranking anyone above anyone else. The selection will continue to come from artists I choose myself, and I will add to this preview as more names come to mind. For now, each of these 40 entries offers a hundred words towards the longer article to come.
Yoshitaka Amano
Yoshitaka Amano is where I want this series to begin. His illustrations for Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunter D allow a figure to feel both precisely observed and on the verge of dissolving. A face, a sweep of fabric or a thin black contour can carry the whole composition. His work makes me interested in the distance between an illustration and its eventual translation into animation or a game. The first article will look closely at that drawing language, its delicate surfaces and restless movement, and the freedom that survives when an image leaves so much open to the imagination.
Alan Lee
Alan Lee gives Tolkien's Middle-earth a weather, a weight and a sense of long habitation. His Tolkien illustrations suggest that a landscape continues beyond the frame, carrying histories that the figures passing through it may only partly understand. Pencil and watercolour leave room for mist, worn stone and uncertain distances. I want to spend time with that restraint, and with the relationship between his book illustrations and the environments developed for Peter Jackson's films. Lee's article will consider how an artist makes an imagined place feel discoverable, and how quiet observation can sustain the scale of an enormous literary world.
Ralph McQuarrie
Before Star Wars became a familiar collection of places and silhouettes, Ralph McQuarrie painted possibilities. His production paintings helped give George Lucas's developing ideas a visible form, establishing moods and relationships that could guide a much larger collaboration. I am interested in the confidence of those images: distant structures, immense machines and small figures moving through convincing space. They hold together even when the designs differ from what eventually reached the screen. His article will return to the paintings as paintings, looking at composition, light and scale, and at how an individual image can help a production believe in itself.
Akihiko Yoshida
Akihiko Yoshida's character designs make clothing, posture and proportion part of the storytelling. Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII offer different settings, yet his attention to the figure gives each an unmistakable human presence. Armour and fabric suggest lives shaped by institutions, work and conflict. His later designs for NieR: Automata show how effectively a limited visual vocabulary can establish an identity. I want to examine the decisions inside those silhouettes, including what is simplified and what receives intricate attention. Yoshida's article will follow the drawing into the game while keeping the original image in view throughout.
Yoji Shinkawa
Yoji Shinkawa's drawings can make a body look as though it has arrived through movement. His work on Metal Gear and Death Stranding joins expressive brushwork to remarkably clear character and mechanical design. A dark stroke can carry the weight of a coat, a weapon or an entire stance, while an unfinished edge leaves the figure breathing. I want to look at how that apparent immediacy accommodates such carefully considered equipment and anatomy. Shinkawa's article will explore the drawing as a record of decisions, and the challenge of carrying its energy into the more fixed surfaces of a finished game.
James Gleeson
James Gleeson belongs here as an Australian painter whose surrealism makes looking an unstable activity. Bodies, landscapes and unfamiliar organic structures appear to emerge from one another, resisting an easy division between a figure and its surroundings. His paintings invite close inspection without guaranteeing that inspection will settle anything. I am drawn to that uncertainty, and to the way a surface can remain seductive while its subject becomes unsettling. Gleeson's article will consider his imagery and working methods alongside his place in Australian art, giving the paintings time to reveal their internal relationships before trying to explain every strange form.
Nicolas Marlet
Nicolas Marlet, often credited as Nico Marlet, gives animated characters an extraordinary amount of personality before they move. His designs for Kung Fu Panda make shape and proportion carry temperament: a body already suggests how its owner might stand, react or occupy a room. The drawings retain the pleasure of caricature while solving practical problems for animation. I want to explore that balance, especially the choices that make an animal readable as an individual without losing its physical identity. Marlet's article will follow the character through sketches and variations, paying attention to the expressive possibilities contained in a single pose.
John Dyer Baizley
John Dyer Baizley's artwork makes the relationship between a record and its cover worth lingering over. His paintings for Baroness gather bodies, flowers and carefully interlocking forms into compositions that reward sustained looking. Their density gives the eye a route through the image without exhausting what it can find there. Although Baizley is also the band's singer and guitarist, this article will concentrate on his visual practice. I want to examine how the pictures establish their own atmosphere alongside the music, and how colour, repetition and anatomical detail allow an album sleeve to become a work in its own right.
Denis Forkas
Denis Forkas brings an interest in ritual, symbolic imagery and the unsettling body to painting. His artwork for Behemoth's The Satanist offers one entry into a practice that deserves attention beyond its association with a particular record. I want to look closely at the material presence of those images, their dark surfaces and the uneasy relationship between a recognisable figure and something harder to identify. The eventual article will consider how symbols acquire force through composition and handling, and how an album commission can introduce a wider artistic language whose meanings remain open, difficult and resistant to a quick reading.
Paul Romano
Paul Romano's artwork for Mastodon gives an album a visual environment spacious enough to inhabit. Leviathan, Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye each invite a different kind of encounter, connecting densely worked imagery with the band's changing musical concerns. I am interested in how Romano organises complexity, and in the relationship between a central image and the surrounding design of a release. His article will examine the cover as part of a larger physical object, where typography, colour and additional artwork influence the experience. It will also leave room for the pictures to be considered independently of the music itself.
Alex Grey
Alex Grey makes the human body a meeting place for anatomy, consciousness and spiritual speculation. His collaborations with Tool, including Lateralus and 10,000 Days, have brought that imagery into an unusually close relationship with music and its presentation. The repeated eyes, exposed structures and radiating patterns invite a kind of looking that moves between recognition and disorientation. I want to explore how the paintings are constructed, and how their visual language changes when it becomes packaging, animation or a stage environment. Grey's article will consider the work's intentions alongside the actual experience of encountering its highly organised and insistent surfaces.
Marald van Haasteren
Marald van Haasteren, whose work appears under Marald Art, brings extraordinary care to images associated with heavy music. His drawings and paintings combine intricate surfaces with a strong sense of movement, allowing an image to feel crowded without becoming inert. His collaborations with John Dyer Baizley also make him an interesting neighbour within this preview, although his work deserves its own sustained attention. I want to explore the material decisions behind that intensity, including the handling of colour and the interaction of organic forms. Marald's article will look beyond the commission towards the distinctive judgement that makes each composition hold.
John Howe
John Howe's Tolkien work gives imagined creatures and places a persuasive physical presence. His drawings attend to the way armour fits, a building bears weight or a creature occupies space, allowing invention to remain connected to observation. Alongside Alan Lee, he helped develop the visual world of Peter Jackson's acclaimed Middle-earth films, but his illustrations offer their own paths through the stories. I want to spend time with the drawings before their translation into sets, costumes and effects. Howe's article will consider the knowledge beneath the image, and how an artist's understanding of material things can make fantasy more convincing.
Brian Froud
Brian Froud's creatures seem to have habits, grievances and private intentions before a story gives them anything to do. His work for The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth grows from an illustrated world in which roots, faces and bodies share an unruly physical language. I am interested in the personality of those forms, and in how a drawing can suggest the texture and behaviour of something that will eventually be built. Froud's article will look at that passage into puppetry alongside his books and independent imagery, following the small visual decisions that make an invented being feel inconveniently, wonderfully alive nearby.
John Tenniel
John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass give nonsense an unusually firm visual footing. The characters occupy their strange situations with the authority of observed people, however impossible the situation becomes. Their expressions, clothing and gestures establish a social world that remains recognisable beneath the absurdity. I want to examine that precision, especially the relationship between a disciplined line and an event that refuses ordinary logic. Tenniel's article will return to the illustrations beside Lewis Carroll's writing, considering how images can shape a reader's understanding so thoroughly that later versions must negotiate with them.
John Bauer
John Bauer's forests make a small human figure feel exposed to a much older presence. His Swedish fairy tale illustrations gather trolls, trees and subdued light into scenes that can be beautiful and quietly threatening at once. The landscape seems capable of watching whoever enters it. Bauer was among the illustrators cited as influences on Ubisoft's Child of Light, a connection I want to explore alongside the original pictures. His article will consider scale, colour and the placement of figures, and how a forest can acquire character through the patient arrangement of trunks, shadows and the spaces between them all.
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer's prints make disciplined observation and extraordinary invention feel inseparable. His Northern Renaissance work gives fur, armour, foliage and stone their own precise behaviour, while images such as Melencolia I and the Apocalypse woodcuts continue to resist simple explanations. I want to examine how line produces both material clarity and psychological unease. The article will give attention to the differences between engraving and woodcut, and to the relationship between technical control and an image's capacity to disturb. Dürer offers this series an opportunity to slow down before pictures whose smallest marks remain active across centuries of reproduction and reinterpretation.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Giovanni Battista Piranesi's imagined prisons make architecture feel like a thought that has grown beyond its thinker. Stairways, bridges and immense interiors promise routes through space while repeatedly unsettling any secure sense of scale. His Carceri invite the eye to travel, then complicate the journey. I want to consider those etchings alongside my interest in the monumental environments of Ico and The Last Guardian, exploring visual affinities without assuming a documented line of influence. Piranesi's article will examine the experience of looking through an impossible building, and the ways architecture can suggest confinement even while appearing to continue without end.
Daisuke Satake
Daisuke Satake offers a way to give individual attention to the artists behind FromSoftware's imagery. His credits include concept work on Bloodborne and character concepts for Elden Ring, alongside lead concept roles on Dark Souls II and III. Those are collaborative worlds, and I want to understand his contribution without assigning an entire studio's achievement to one person. The Dark Souls Design Works interview provides a valuable starting point, including discussion of Firelink Shrine and Gwyn. Satake's article will follow the available credits and designs carefully, looking for the decisions behind images whose creators often remain unfamiliar to their audiences.
Ken Sugimori
Ken Sugimori helped establish the visual language through which Pokémon became recognisable as creatures with distinct personalities. His early official illustrations make economical use of pose, contour and watercolour, giving even an unfamiliar anatomy an approachable coherence. Pokémon design has always involved other artists, and the article will acknowledge that collaboration while examining Sugimori's particular contribution. I want to look closely at how a creature can remain legible across an illustration, a small game sprite and later interpretations. His work offers a useful way to consider character design as a relationship between immediate recognition, suggestive detail and room for imagination.
Beth Cavener
Beth Cavener's sculptures use animal bodies to express states that are uncomfortably recognisable as human. A bent neck, a tightened limb or an exposed flank can suggest fear, resistance or a difficult intimacy without settling into a simple illustration of any one emotion. Her ceramic forms bring weight and vulnerability into the same encounter. I want to approach these works from several angles, giving their physical presence the attention a photograph can only begin to suggest. Cavener's article will explore gesture, surface and the charged space between figures, and how an animal form can make human behaviour newly visible again.
Rafael Grassetti
Rafael Grassetti brings a sculptor's attention to volume and anatomy into digital character creation. His work associated with God of War makes the body carry history through posture, proportion and the treatment of its surface. The interest extends beyond detail: a figure needs to hold together at a distance before its smaller features reward inspection. I want to examine that movement between silhouette and close observation, including the relationship between a sculpt and its eventual presentation in a game. Grassetti's article will consider digital sculpture as a visual practice with its own materials, constraints and opportunities for expressive physical presence.
Dylan Cole
Dylan Cole makes imagined environments feel as though light has been moving through them long before the camera arrived. His work spans matte painting, concept art and production design, including Avatar and its sequels. I am interested in how those roles connect: an image must communicate a place while also helping other people build, animate and photograph it. Cole's article will examine atmosphere, scale and the organisation of detail, especially the choices that make an enormous landscape readable. It will also consider the standalone painting, where the eye can explore at its own pace without a film determining the duration.
Rael Lyra
Rael Lyra's concept work for South of Midnight gives this preview another route into character design. Hazel's original design, credited to Lyra by fellow artists on the project, offers a starting point for examining how personality emerges through proportion, stance and clothing. I want to look at the drawings alongside their later development, including the contributions of artists who translated and extended them. Lyra's article will explore the imaginative possibilities of the initial concept while respecting that wider collaboration. It will also provide space to look beyond a single game and consider the recurring interests visible across his character work.
João Bragato
João Bragato's South of Midnight work moves between characters, creatures and environments with an appealing sense of physical invention. His published concepts for Benjy the Tree show how a being can also become a place the player moves through. Other designs reveal the practical thinking beneath an expressive surface, from costume variations to material notes for production. I want to follow those stages without losing the delight of the image itself. Bragato's article will examine the relationship between exploratory drawing and a finished design, including how an artist develops a creature that must function within both a story and gameplay.
Scott Campbell
Scott Campbell's work on Psychonauts makes exaggeration feel unusually welcoming. As the original game's art director and a concept artist alongside Peter Chan, he helped give its characters a visual language flexible enough for comedy, discomfort and tenderness. The figures can look delightfully awkward while remaining immediately expressive. I want to examine how those shapes carry personality, and how a drawing survives its translation into an animated game character. Campbell's article will return to the sketches and the finished world together, considering the judgement behind a style that gives psychological strangeness such a distinctive, inviting and often very funny form.
Doug Chiang
Doug Chiang makes the machines and creatures of Star Wars feel as though they belong to a working world. His art for the prequel films helped give that era a look of its own, while keeping a clear link to the original trilogy. I want to study how his drawings make those links visible, from the first shape of a ship to the smaller parts that suggest how it works. Chiang's article will follow sketches and paintings into film design, looking at how a drawn idea takes form in the work of teams who must build, animate and light it.
Zbigniew M. Bielak
Zbigniew M. Bielak's artwork for Ghost gives an album the density of an illustrated building. His covers for Meliora, Prequelle and Impera gather architectural detail, symbolic figures and elaborate framing into images that reward repeated inspection. Their theatricality suits the music, but the drawings also sustain a slower encounter of their own. I want to follow the routes he gives the eye, and the way tiny incidents accumulate within a larger composition. Bielak's article will examine the craft behind that complexity, exploring how a record cover can hold an atmosphere, a narrative suggestion and the pleasure of looking for longer.
Zdzisław Beksiński
Zdzisław Beksiński's paintings give ruined places and strange bodies a presence that can be hard to shake. A tower, a face or a vast empty plain may seem familiar at first, then grow less certain the longer I look. I want to spend time with that feeling, and with the care given to light, colour and the worn surfaces of things. His article will return to the paintings without forcing a story onto each image. It will also look beyond his fantastic landscapes, towards the photographs, drawings and sculptures that reveal how much his art changed across a working life.
H. R. Giger
H. R. Giger's biomechanical imagery joins anatomy and machinery so closely that the distinction becomes difficult to maintain. His creature designs for Ridley Scott's film Alien offer a familiar entrance into a much larger body of painting, drawing and sculpture, where surfaces suggest both an engineered object and something capable of growth. I want to examine the construction of that unease, including the airbrush transitions that make a form appear to continue beneath its visible boundary. Giger's article will follow those relationships across images, creatures and interiors, considering how a visual language can become an environment that surrounds the viewer.
Allen Williams
Allen Williams's drawings make a strange body feel as though it has slowly emerged from the paper itself. His graphite work gives close attention to surface, allowing a creature to seem fragile, solid and difficult to name at once. His illustrations for Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun offer one route into a wider practice that also includes painting and concept design. I want to look at how a recognisable form becomes unfamiliar through small decisions. Williams's article will explore those changes, and the room his images leave for the viewer to make associations of their own while looking.
Wayne Barlowe
Wayne Barlowe approaches an invented creature with the attention a natural history artist might give an animal encountered in the field. Expedition makes that connection especially clear, presenting alien life as something with habits, bodies and relationships that can be observed. His infernal paintings take the same precision into a very different imaginative setting. I want to examine how an unfamiliar anatomy becomes persuasive, and what a painting suggests about the place around its subject. Barlowe's article will explore the visual choices that let an impossible being appear to have a life beyond the particular image in which it stands.
Katsuya Terada
Katsuya Terada's drawing makes a crowded image feel alive to its own possibilities. Bodies, clothing and mechanical details gather through a line that can be precise without losing the pleasure of discovery. His manga and illustration, including The Monkey King, give this series a chance to look closely at how a drawing develops its internal rhythm. I am interested in the movement between a loose mark and a fully considered form. Terada's article will follow that movement across finished work and sketches, attending to the places where an image seems to keep thinking even after the drawing itself is complete.
Piotr Jabłoński
Piotr Jabłoński's images give unfamiliar figures and places a heavy, uneasy presence. His published Destiny IP concepts offer one starting point, with creature studies that suggest a larger world while remaining compelling as individual pictures. I am interested in their suggestion of stories that remain outside the visible frame. I want to look at how light, texture and proportion make something invented feel physically near. Jabłoński's article will explore the relationship between atmosphere and design, following the point at which an image stops being an arrangement of shapes and begins to suggest a place with its own difficult, unspoken history.
Christopher Shy
Christopher Shy's images often seem to hold a scene just as it is becoming visible. Light and colour gather around figures whose surroundings remain uncertain, making atmosphere an active part of the storytelling. His work through Studio Ronin, including graphic novels such as Dead Space: Salvage, gives that approach room to develop across successive images. I want to explore how a picture can feel complete while leaving so much unresolved. Shy's article will consider the relationship between painting and narrative, and how the placement of a face or a bright passage can guide the eye through an otherwise unstable space.
Drew Struzan
Drew Struzan could gather a film's people, movement and promise into a single painted composition. His posters for Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future make portraiture part of a larger arrangement, where a face can carry both recognition and anticipation. I want to look at the decisions that hold those images together, including the balance between carefully rendered likenesses and the freer marks around them. Struzan's article will return to the paintings as works of illustration, considering how a poster can become an enduring companion to a film and a distinct visual experience in its own right.
John Alvin
John Alvin made light carry an extraordinary amount of feeling. His posters for E.T. and Blade Runner suggest entire worlds through a glow, a silhouette or the charged space between two figures. Their appeal often begins before the image has yielded all its details. I want to examine that first encounter, and the way a painting can prepare an audience for a film without explaining its story. Alvin's article will consider the work behind those familiar images, following the relationship between concept sketches, finished art and the emotional invitation that allows a poster to remain vivid long after its release.
Raymond Swanland
Raymond Swanland gives a figure the sense that it is caught within forces larger than itself. His work on Oddworld provides one route into that interest in movement, light and the physical character of an imagined place. I want to explore how a strong composition carries the eye through complex forms, and how a creature can remain readable within a busy image. Swanland's article will consider the relationship between production design and illustration, looking at the individual picture alongside the collaborative work of making a game. It will also consider the wider range of his fantasy illustrations beyond that game.
Farzad Varahramyan
Farzad Varahramyan's Oddworld work gives this series a chance to look at the patient development behind an unusual creature. His collaboration with Lorne Lanning on Munch makes the process especially interesting: a character emerged through repeated changes, with small surviving features helping to carry one version towards the next. I want to follow that work alongside the drawings themselves, considering how an invented body suggests behaviour, vulnerability and a place within its world. Varahramyan's article will explore the relationship between an artist's imagination and a shared visual language, where an unexpected idea must still belong beside everything established around it.
Mark “Crash” McCreery
Mark “Crash” McCreery's creatures suggest how much character can exist within the structure of a body. His work on Jurassic Park and his production design for Rango offer different ways to consider that relationship, from a convincing animal presence to an exaggerated figure with a very particular personality. I want to examine the drawings that precede the finished creature, looking at the choices that make an expression or a posture feel inevitable. McCreery's article will follow the design through its practical demands, while keeping attention on the imagination that allows an unfamiliar being to appear capable of thinking for itself.
This preview will keep growing as I choose the next artists to explore. Isamu Kamikokuryo remains a tentative future addition. The longer articles will make room for individual works, their making and my own responses to them; this is the beginning of that collection.
Sources and further viewing
Biographical details and project credits are linked below. The discussion of each artist’s work reflects my own response to it.
Yoshitaka Amano: Official biography; VIZ artist biography.
Alan Lee: HarperCollins on The Hobbit Sketchbook.
Ralph McQuarrie: Lucasfilm on McQuarrie's work; McQuarrie interview.
Akihiko Yoshida: Square Enix interview on PlayStation Blog; Square Enix announcement.
Yoji Shinkawa: Kojima Productions artist feature; Publisher interview.
James Gleeson: National Gallery of Australia exhibition; National Portrait Gallery biography.
Nicolas Marlet: Contemporary character design coverage.
John Dyer Baizley: Baroness release credits; Interview on the artwork process.
Denis Forkas: Nergal interview on the commission; Artwork credits.
Paul Romano: Romano's album art portfolio; Rhino anniversary release.
Alex Grey: Grey's official biography and Tool credits; Artist interview.
Marald van Haasteren: Metallica interview; Commissioned artwork and media.
John Howe: Artist biography; Representation portfolio and film credits.
Brian Froud: Jim Henson Company biography; Publisher biography.
John Tenniel: Library of Congress collection record; UBC Library on the Alice illustrators.
John Bauer: Nationalmuseum on Bauer's illustrations; Child of Light director interview.
Albrecht Dürer: University of Melbourne on the master engravings; Art Gallery of South Australia collection.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Metropolitan Museum collection; National Gallery of Victoria exhibition.
Daisuke Satake: Game credits; Dark Souls Design Works interview translation.
Ken Sugimori: Nintendo interview with Sugimori; Pokémon creator interview.
Beth Cavener: Artist statement; Official sculpture portfolio.
Rafael Grassetti: Official portfolio; Gnomon artist biography.
Dylan Cole: Official biography; Avatar concept art feature.
Rael Lyra: Hazel production artist's concept credit; Bragato's credit to Lyra; Artist portfolio feature.
João Bragato: Artist's concept art collection; Benjy development portfolio.
Scott Campbell: Double Fine's original game credits.
Doug Chiang: Doug Chiang Studio; Lucasfilm biography.
Zbigniew M. Bielak: Official artist biography; Ghost artwork collection.
Zdzisław Beksiński: Historical Museum in Sanok biography; Beksiński Foundation.
H. R. Giger: Official artist website; HR Giger Museum biography.
Allen Williams: Official artist biography; Artist curriculum vitae.
Wayne Barlowe: Official artist biography; Official project credits.
Katsuya Terada: Official artist sketchbook; Kaikai Kiki Gallery biography.
Piotr Jabłoński: Official artist portfolio; Destiny IP concepts and artist's notes.
Christopher Shy: Official artist and studio biography; Official artist portfolio.
Drew Struzan: Official artist website; Lucasfilm retrospective.
John Alvin: Official estate biography; Estate representative on Blade Runner artwork.
Raymond Swanland: Artist website; Archived official Oddworld interview.
Farzad Varahramyan: Official artist biography; Artist's Oddworld production portfolio; Interview on Munch and collaboration.
Mark “Crash” McCreery: LightBox Expo artist biography; Concept Art Association profile.
