To help people make nominations for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, we have set up a "lightbox" system to let fans quickly flip through the works of the artists listed below and to set aside the ones they particularly liked. Here's how it works:
Most of the art consists of covers for magazines, anthologies, novellas, and illustrations for short fiction reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank in 2015.
Some of the art consists of book covers from the "year's best" science fiction and fantasy lists by Goodreads and Amazon (via Chaos Horizon's blog), Barnes & Noble, io9, and Kirkus Reviews. There are many many more books and magazines published in 2015 not included here, so this list is by no means complete.
Note that the artist is the person credited as the source of the cover/jacket art. If the source is absent or is a stock photography/illustration service (such as Shutterstock or Getty Images), we name the cover/jacket designer as the artist.
For folks interested in the history this category, John Picacio (winner 2012 and 2013) wrote A Visual History of the Best Professional Artist Hugo Award Winners that's a fun read. To understand the work that goes into creating a book cover, have a look at How Could The Winds of Winter Be Published In Only Three Months?
See also the 2015 Fan Artists. Go back to the 2016 Hugo Awards.
- In the artist list below, click on a thumbnail image. The lighbox should open, showing a larger image of the work.
- If you like the picture, ctrl-click (or long-press) the artist's name above it. That will reopen this page in a new tab with that artist's information at the top.
- Press the right-arrow key (or tap the picture) to advance to the next picture.
- Once you've looked at all the pictures, go through the tabs you opened. For most artists there's a link to his/her website where you can find a gallery of their work.
- Browse the gallery and see if the picture you liked was representative of their work as a whole.
- Close the tabs of the ones you liked least.
When I did this myself, it took fewer than ten minutes to sift through the list, and I ended up with just 12 artists to choose from. It took about ten more minutes of browsing the artists' websites to cut that to five for my Best Professional Artist nominations.
WARNING: If you are on a limited data plan and view every picture in the lightbox, the full-size images come to about 75 MB total.
Click here to jump to the artist list, or continue reading...
The artists listed below created art for professional magazines, standalone novellas, and books in 2015 that make them eligible for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist.WARNING: If you are on a limited data plan and view every picture in the lightbox, the full-size images come to about 75 MB total.
Click here to jump to the artist list, or continue reading...
How Did We Choose These Artists?
Most of the art consists of covers for magazines, anthologies, novellas, and illustrations for short fiction reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank in 2015.
Some of the art consists of book covers from the "year's best" science fiction and fantasy lists by Goodreads and Amazon (via Chaos Horizon's blog), Barnes & Noble, io9, and Kirkus Reviews. There are many many more books and magazines published in 2015 not included here, so this list is by no means complete.
Note that the artist is the person credited as the source of the cover/jacket art. If the source is absent or is a stock photography/illustration service (such as Shutterstock or Getty Images), we name the cover/jacket designer as the artist.
For folks interested in the history this category, John Picacio (winner 2012 and 2013) wrote A Visual History of the Best Professional Artist Hugo Award Winners that's a fun read. To understand the work that goes into creating a book cover, have a look at How Could The Winds of Winter Be Published In Only Three Months?
See also the 2015 Fan Artists. Go back to the 2016 Hugo Awards.
I believe Jon Foster's cover for Tor.com's "The Last Witness" would be a good addition to his small set above. At least, the novella is from 2015, which makes me think the artwork likely is, too.
ReplyDeleteMaurizio Manzieri's artwork for the "Year's Best" appears to have been used as an Asimov's cover in 2014; it's tough to read the year, but he used the image to link to a page of *2014* work that's eligible for 2015 awards. That makes me think it's not a good sample for his 2015 work for 2016 awards, so you may want to remove it...?
All artists should have pages listing work eligible for year X (whatever the latest year is) awards. Or at the very least, have publication year info for artwork they show on their site.
Thanks for the suggestions. The Jon Foster cover has been added and the Maurizio Manzieri cover has been removed.
DeleteThanks! Jon Foster's one of my fave artists (I really like Manzieri's work, too, actually). I hope he gets some Hugo love one of these years. ;-)
DeleteYou appear to be missing Larry Elmore's cover for "Son of the Black Sword" by Larry Correia...
ReplyDeleteI've added it. I double-checked the Goodreads, Amazon, B&N, io9, and Kirkus "year's best" lists and didn't see it there (the source of the book covers on this page) but it was easy to do a single custom request. :-)
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