Good Concept Art Books

[marx]

I am a 3d animator working on large personal projects in the realm of sci fi and fantasy. I am looking for great concept art books. I like variety but specific subjects are cool. I liked the Macross design works and Alan Lee's LOTR sketchbook. I also enjoyed FF9 and Xenogears although I felt it to be lacking some. Since many people here share similar interests I was wondering if anyone could recommend some good concept art books. Approved or unanproved concepts, designs, sketches, even unfinished pieces.

[halfan]

I've always enjoyed Robert McCall's art. I only have one book of his called Vision of the Future. It's kind of old, around 1982 or so. That book is filled with concept art, mostly paintings and narrative. There is stuff for Disney's Blackhole, Star Trek The Motion Picture and many original pieces. Lots of floating cities similar to those in FFXII. I have seen a couple of his more recent pieces and his style hasn't changed much.

[chrono]

There are few 'concept' artbooks around, so your gonna be stuck with regular artbooks more or less.

I will recommend the new The Art of Star Wars movie books as they have thousands of unused peices. Syd Mead is an artist to look around for because of his diversity. John Berkey is a painter, but his work has massively influenced thousands. And a simple www.A9.com search on any artist will yield ALOT of images.

Well Magic Knight Rayearth has the 1-2 combo of fantasy/sf though it's anime oriented. The same can be said for Slayers and other Japanese books. Korean artbooks are nearly the same but have slightly greater range.

These places have a good variety:

http://www.animebooks.com/index.html

http://www.hlj.com/

http://store.cgsociety.org/

[Sarensaas]

Yes, the Star Wars EP3 Artbook is on shelves now, very good stuff. It is a departure fron Doug Chiang's grey marker art that I liked so much on Ep 1. More of a photoshop impressionism look by Tiemens and Church and others (Ian McCraig's gorgeous character art!). None of them have topped the master, Ralph McQuarrie's beautiful work on the originals (not to mention the great stuff by Joe Johnston and Nilo Rodis and others) but still some great stuff.

John Berkey is another artist I recommend. Also, Makoto Kobayashi does incredible concept work for animation.

[marx]

Thanks everyone, I do appreciate your suggestions. I'm gonna look into all of them.

[SpacePirateNeko]

I love art books.....i dropped 300 bucks to own The Sky which was basically amanos work for ff 1-10

other then that i have a ton of art books , my fav artist being amano and mikimoto

Elvenz by mikimoto is a must have filled to teh brim with beautiful artwork

[drifand]

If you only get one book, it has to be Syd Myd's OBLAGON - Expert use of color, perspectives and dimension to depict believeable techno-futurist moods and scenarios.

Also consider JOURNEYMAN, a retrospective of Chris Moore's superb SF and fantasy renderings.

[Amped]

I'm a professional 3D designer, but since I was a kid one of my hobbies has been to collect books containing concept art - movies, cars, architecture... whatever... just general inspirational coolness!

Old issues of Starlog are a surprisingly good resource for neat little examples of otherwise hard-to-find concept art. They often accompany articles detailing the development of various movies.

Hunt down the Sketchbooks for Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, & Return of the Jedi; all have great examples of classic black and white/ grey marker-style concept illustrations, and exhibit a wealth of pre-production drawings and character development sketches. They're primarily B&W/ grey scale and relatively slim, but man are there some great sketches! Bonus: they can be had for pretty cheap too! (5- 20 dollars, or so, depending on condition) If you like loose stuff as opposed to finished paintings or illustrations, these books are great! (The 'Art of...' Star Wars books are better for more flashy stuff.) Joe Johnston's stuff is clean and exhibits a great balance between 'tight and loose' styles.

The Illustrated Star Wars Universe has a lot of really great Ralph Mcquarrie stuff. His stuff is soooo far superior to the style of Doug Chaing (who was just basically parroting Mcquarrie's style) in the Phantom Menace concept art. You can tell Mcquarrie had a long real-world background in the aerospace industry, cause his stuff all looks plausible... yet fantastic!

If you are a Star Trek fan, then The Art of Star Trek is a must-have.. lots and lots of cool stuff from the original TV series up until New Generation, if I recall correctly.

Personally I think Syd Mead is overatted (perhaps thats too harsh... maybe just too dated?)... but the dude is damn prolific... and is a phenomenal conceptual visionary. Hunt out his older stuff for U.S. Steel from the 60's like Sentinel. Its kinda wild how much his stuff has been ripped off by other concept artists. He had an illustration of a quadraped walking mecha in the snow that I can only imagine inspire the walkers in Empire Strikes Back. Plus he has contributed to so many movies: Alien, Blade Runner, 2010, etc... even Gundam. Japanese designers, especially, have long worshiped Syd alongside Luigi Colani.

Which reminds me: if you can hunt down any of the old Car Styling books on Colani, you'd probably dig those. He was probably one of the biggest proponents of modernist 'organic' design for products and vehicles. Quite an avant-garde dude. His books have excellent examples of scale models.. his 'concept' illustration is a bit too fine-artsy-fartsy for me.. but the dude had a singular vision, that's for sure.

Speaking of Car Styling (the Japanese car design magazine), it is an excellent resource for concept art in the transportation design field. Likewise, Auto Design is a similar style magazine published in Europe (Italy in particular, I believe).

As for architecture, Lebbeus Woods' conceptual illustrations are much beloved by many architect-types. They're pretty wild, kinda Escher-ish with a dash of deconstructivist post modernism.

I'll haveta scan my bookcases at home to refresh my memory on any other forgotten gems...

[chrono]

I totally forgot about this link: http://www.conceptart.org/

D'OH!!!

I also personally must suggest H.R. Giger's Biomechanics artbook. Not so much for it's abstracts but for the atmosphere and sub-level of texture he paints at. And Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! artbook, again for it's atmosphere and it's arcitecter(spl).