Donato Giancola (1967)

Donato Giancola was born in Colchester, Vermont, USA in 1967. Since beginning his professional career in 1993, Donato's list of clients has grown to include major book publishers and collectors in New York to concept design firms on the West Coast: notables include The United Nations, LucasFilm, National Geographic, CNN, DC Comics, Microsoft, The Village Voice, Playboy Magazine, US Postal Service, Wizards of the Coast , Scholastic, Simon&Schuster, Tor Books, Random House, Time/Warner, The Scifi Channel, Milton-Bradley, and Hasbro. Merits range from the prestigious Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators to nineteen Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, three Artist Hugo Awards for outstanding professional work from the World Science Fiction Society, notable awards from the Art Renewal Center, and multiple silver and gold medals from the juried annual Spectrum: The Best of Contemporary Fantastic Art.

Juan Giménez López (1943)

Juan Giménez López was born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1943. Fascinated since childhood by the drawing, he began imitating comics and Hispanic and Spanish books covers. Later he dedicated to drawing sequences of movies he liked, and even play them in clay. So he learned to draw narrative sequences. He completed his training studying Industrial Design.

He worked in several Argentine advertising agencies, learning to synthesize the narrative to the millimeter. In 1976, he performs the cartoo war omic As The Pique (Ace of Spades) with writer Ricardo Barreiro.

In the late seventies he moved to Europe, starting to draw cartoons for publishers. In 1979 published his first color album Estrella Negra (Blak Star). Then published Basura, Cuestión de Tiempo (Rubbish, Question of Time), whose script he also wrote, El Cuarto Poder (The Fourth Power), Leo Roa and  Juego Eterno (Eternal Game).

Currently he's living in Sitges (Spain) and collaborates with Alejandro Jodorowsky in the series La Casta de los Metabarones (The Caste of the Metabarons) (Jodorowsky is the writer), and a short film in preproduction.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849)

Katsushika Hokusai was born in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, in 1760 (exact date questionable). He was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting.
Hokusai is best known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji which includes the internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s.

Terry Rodgers (1947)

Terry Rodgers was born in New Jersey, United States in 1947. He is known for his large scale canvases that focus on portraying contemporary body politics. He graduated cum laude from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1969, with a major in Fine Arts. His strong interest in film and photography influenced his style in the direction of representational realism in art.

Steve Smith (1975)

Steve Smith was born in England in 1975. He is self taught, with no formal art training. The images he paints are snapshots of a dream reality, a form of escapism through vivid, luscious colour and fantastical recollection, permeated with an overwhelming sense of personal nostalgia.

Steve's work has sold worldwide, and has also been used for album artwork, international advertising, and has featured in both national and international press.

Kal Gajoum (1968)

Kal Gajoum was born in Tripoli, Libya in 1968. He moved to Paris to learn watercolour techniques and the Parisian style of painting from a private artist. In Malta he spent his time as a professional artist where he spent seven years working for the Royal Fine Art Gallery, in 2000 Kal found himself in Britain where he ran the Center Of Britain Art Gallery and in 2003 Kal immigrated to Canada where he now resides in British Columbia, Quebec and France.

James Gurney (1958)

James Gurney was born in Glendale, California, United States in 1958. He is an artist and author best known for his illustrated book series Dinotopia, which is presented in the form of a 19th century explorer’s journal from an island utopia cohabited by humans and dinosaurs.

Gurney's freelance illustration career began in the 1980s, during which time he developed his characteristic realistic renderings of fantastic scenes, painted in oil using methods similar to the academic realists and Golden Age illustrators. He painted more than 70 covers for science fiction and fantasy paperback novels, and he created several stamp designs for the US Postal Service, most notably The World of Dinosaurs in 1996.

Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844 - 1930)

Ilya Yefimovich Repin was born in Chuguyev, Russia, in 1844. He was a realist painter and the most renowned Russian artist of the 19th century. He played a major role in bringing Russian art into the mainstream of European culture. Repin persistently searched for new techniques and content to give his work more fulness and depth. His method was the reverse of impressionism. He produced works slowly and carefully. They were the result of close and detailed study. With some of his paintings, he made one hundred or more preliminary sketches.

Mort Künstler (1931)

Mort Künstler was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States in 1931. He is an American artist known for his illustrative paintings of the American Civil War. His works are primarily sold as mass-produced printed reproductions. Künstler is also known for earlier commercial illustration before turning to Civil War themes in the early 1980s, a body of work that dealt with America's national story: from portraits of prehistoric American life to the odyssey of the space shuttle. His work has also been published in illustrated books and magazines and used by advertising agencies.

Gabriel Moreno (1973)

Gabriel Moreno was born in Baena, Córdoba, Spain, in 1973. He is an illustrator, engraver and painter based in Madrid, graduated in Fine Arts at Sevilla's University in 1998. Since then he has worked in different design studios and Andalusian advertising agencies. In 2004 he moved to Madrid, where in June 2007 he began to move his portfolio and after being selected amongst the 20 new talents of illustration, by the London magazine Computers Arts and receive their first assignments in advertising began his career as an illustrator.

Virgil Finlay (1914 - 1971)

Virgil Warden Finlay was born in Rochester, New York, United States, in 1914. He was a pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator. While he worked in a range of media, from gouache to oils, Finlay specialized in, and became famous for, detailed pen-and-ink drawings accomplished with abundant stippling, cross-hatching, and scratchboard techniques. Despite the very labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of his specialty, Finlay created more than 2600 works of graphic art in his 35-year career.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Finlay in 2012.

Ralph McQuarrie (1929 - 2012)

Ralph Angus McQuarrie was born in Gary, Indiana, United States, in 1929. He was a conceptual designer and illustrator who designed the original Star Wars trilogy, the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,  Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

McQuarrie worked as a technical illustrator for Boeing, as well as designing film posters and animating CBS News's coverage of the Apollo space program at the three-man company Reel Three.

Stanley Meltzoff (1917 - 2006)

Stanley Meltzoff was born in New York, United States, in 1917. He painted covers and interior spreads for the likes of Life, National Geographic, Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic, and many others. His 65 covers for Scientific American was an indication of the good company that demanded his work. Today his art hangs in the National Gallery (Smithsonian), Getty Museum, and many other world-class institutions.

Bowing to the times, he switched gears and began painting saltwater game fish in their undersea environments.

Richard M. Powers (1921 - 1996)

Richard M. Powers was Born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, in 1921. He began by working in a conventional pulp paperback style, but quickly evolved a personal Surrealist idiom influenced by the cubists and surrealists, especially Picasso and Yves Tanguy. He also dabbled in abstract art and collage at a later age before dying in 1996 at the age of 75.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, he did many of covers for Doubleday. During the 1950s and 1960s, he served as an unofficial art director for Ballantine Books.

Michael Whelan (1950)

Michael Whelan was born in Culver City, California, United States, in 1950. He is an artist of imaginative realism. For more than 30 years he worked as an illustrator specializing in science fiction and fantasy cover art. Since the mid-1990s he has pursued a fine art career, selling non-commissioned paintings through galleries in the United States and through his website.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Whelan in June 2009, the first living artist so honored. According to his Hall of Fame citation:

"Michael Whelan is one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism."

Ed Valigursky (1926 - 2009)

Edward Ignatius Valigursky was born in Arnold, Pennsylvania, United States in 1926. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago on the G. I. Bill. He completed his studies at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He illustrated books for such publishers as Bantam Books, Ballantine Books, Lippincott, Macfadden Publications, and Time-Life Books. He illustrated science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.

In the 1970s he was invited to NASA to illustrate the spectacular space program for Popular Mechanics, where he continued to work until the 1980s.

Jim Burns (1948)

Jim Burns is a Welsh artist born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1948. He studied at Saint Martin's School of Art in London. When he left Saint Martin's in 1972 he had already joined the recently established illustration agency Young Artists. He has been with this agency, later renamed Arena, ever since.

He is today a contemporary British science fiction illustrator. His work mostly deals with science fiction with erotic overtones. His paintings are generally intricate photo-realistic works of beautiful women set against advanced machines and spaceships. While his preparatory sketches are more erotically focused, his final works and published book covers have a more academic tone portraying far off and imaginary worlds.

Peter Elson (1947 - 1998)

Peter Elson was born in Ealing, west London, in 1947. He was an English science fiction illustrator whose work appeared on the covers of numerous science fiction paperback novels, as well as in the Terran Trade Authority series of illustrated books. Elson, whose illustrations often placed detailed, brightly liveried spacecraft against vividly coloured backgrounds, influenced an entire generation of science fiction illustrators and concept artists.

Eddie Jones (1935 - 1999)

Eddie Jones was born in England in 1935. He was a science fiction illustrator, who started as a fan artist. He illustrated numerous science fiction book covers, some under the pseudonym S. Fantoni, and provided interior illustrations for books and magazines. Jones was active in the field from 1958 to 1989. In 1969, he became the art director for Visions of Tomorrow, a short-lived British SF magazine. The Science Fiction Writers of America described him as "the precursor to a generation of artists that helped define the look of early '70s SF illustration".

Julie Bell (1958)

Julie Bell was born in Beaumont, Texas, United States, in 1958. Julie has painted the covers for approximately 100 fantasy/science fiction books and magazines since 1990. In the early 1990s, she illustrated painted covers for video games as well as best-selling trading cards for the superheroes of Marvel and DC. A cover art image from the Sega Game Gear video game Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe would depict the semi-barbaric world that the game took place in; thus being entitled Savage Land by Bell herself.