Wednesday, February 7, 2018

2018 Professional Artists

To help people make nominations for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, we have set up a "lightbox" system to let fans quickly flip through the works of over 113 artists listed below and to set aside the ones they particularly liked. Here's how it works:
  1. In the artist list below, click on a thumbnail image. The lighbox should open, showing a larger image of the work.
  2. 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.
  3. Press the right-arrow key (or tap the picture) to advance to the next picture. Each new artist is preceded by the Hugo Award image.
  4. 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.
  5. Browse the gallery and see if the picture you liked was representative of their work as a whole.
  6. Close the tabs of the ones you liked least.

When I did this myself, it took fewer than fifteen minutes to sift through the list, and I ended up with just 15 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 90 MB total.

Note: Thumbnail images with a highlighted link are professional works done in 2017. Thumbnails without a highlighted link were done earlier (shown in last year's list), later (show in next year's list) or fan art (published in a semi-prozine) and included to give more examples of the artist's style.

Click here to jump to the artist list, or continue reading...

How Did We Choose These Artists?

The artists listed below created art for professional magazines, standalone novellas, and books in 2017 that make them eligible for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist.

Most of the art consists of covers for magazines, anthologies, novellas, and illustrations for short fiction reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank in 2017.

Some of the art consists of book covers from the "year's best" science fiction and fantasy meta-list collated by John DeNardo at Kirkus Reviews. There are many many more books and magazines published in 2017 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? For an in-depth look at creating covers for a series, read Lauren Panepinto's 13-part post on David Dalglish's Shadowdance series.

Go back to the 2018 Hugo Awards.


Aaron Nakahara (Interviews)


Adam Tredowski (Interviews)


Adrian Borda (Interviews)


Alan Bao (Interviews)


Allen Williams (Interviews)


Angelique Shelley (Interviews)


Armando Veve (Interviews)


Ashley Mackenzie (Interviews)


Benedick T. Bana (Interviews)


Bob Eggleton (Interviews)

Eight-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist.

Bryn Barnard (Interviews)


Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor (Interviews)


Caroline Jamhour (Interviews)


Charles Vess (Interviews)


Chris Buzelli (Interviews)


Chris Foss (Interviews)


Christine Foltzer (Interviews)


Clarissa Ferguson (Interviews)


Cliff Neilsen (Interviews)


Cynthia Sheppard (Interviews)


Dana Tiger (Interviews)


David Palumbo (Interviews)


Drive Communications (Interviews)


Eddie Mendoza (Interviews)


Eldar Zakirov (Interviews)


Elizabeth Story (Interviews)


FORT (Interviews)

FORT is a studio, not a person

Gabriel BjΓΆrk StiernstrΓΆm (Interviews)


Galen Dara (Interviews)

Art of SFF: Galen Dara’s Daring Style

GoΓ±i Montes (Interviews)


Greg Ruth (Interviews)

The Wrong Track that Leads to the Right One

Gregory Manchess (Interviews)


Irina Kovalova (Interviews)


Jaime Jones (Interviews)


Jamie Jones (Interviews)


Jamie Stafford-Hill (Interviews)


Jasu Hu (Interviews)


Jeffrey Alan Love (Interviews)

Creating the Artwork for Yoon Ha Lee's "Combustion Hour"

Jim Simpson (Interviews)


Joel Holland (Interviews)


John Coulthart (Interviews)


John Harris (Interviews)


John Picacio (Interviews)


Jon Foster (Interviews)


Jonas De Ro (Interviews)


Julia Lloyd (Interviews)


Julie Dillon (Interviews)

Nominee and winner of multiple Chesley and Hugo Awards. The Art of Julie Dillon

Keith Negley (Interviews)


Keith Rosson (Interviews)


Kent Bash (Interviews)


Keren Katz (Interviews)


Kurt Huggins (Interviews)


Lauren Panepinto (Interviews)


Linda Yan (Interviews)


Lisa Larson-Walker (Interviews)


Lovely Creatures Studio (Interviews)


Marcela Bolivar (Interviews)


Marianna Stelmach (Interviews)


Marianne Plumridge Eggleton (Interviews)


Mark Dudlik (Interviews)


Mark Smith (Interviews)


Marsh Davies (Interviews)


Matt Dixon (Interviews)


Maurizio Manzieri (Interviews)


Max Mitenkov (Interviews)


Micah Epstein (Interviews)


Miranda Meeks (Interviews)


NASA (Interviews)


Nekro (Interviews)


Nicholas Grunas (Interviews)


Odera Igbokwe (Interviews)


Pascal Blanche (Interviews)


Peter Lutjen (Interviews)


Peter Mohrbacher (Interviews)


Quentin Castel (Interviews)


Rado Javor (Interviews)


Randy Gallegos (Interviews)


Red Nose Studio (Interviews)

All Jacked Up: Creating the Art for "Jack of Coins"

Reiko Murakami (Interviews)


Rekha Garton (Interviews)


Richard Anderson (Interviews)


Richie Pope (Interviews)


Robert G. Fresson (Interviews)


Robert Hunt (Interviews)


Rodrigo Corral and Sungpyo Hong (Interviews)

Rodrigo Corral & Sungpyo Hong

Rodrigo Corral and Tyler Comrie (Interviews)

Rodrigo Corral & Tyler Comrie

Ron Miller (Interviews)


Roy Bishop (Interviews)


Ruben Castro (Interviews)


Sam Gretton (Interviews)


Sam Schechter (Interviews)


Sam Weber (Interviews)


Sam Wolfe Connelly (Interviews)


Samuel Araya (Interviews)


Scott Bakal (Interviews)


Sergei Sarichev (Interviews)


Shutterstock (Interviews)


Stephan Martiniere (Interviews)

Nominee and winner of multiple Hugo, Chesley, BSFA, Locus, Spectrum, and World Fantasy Awards for art.

Stephen Youll (Interviews)


Steven Messing (Interviews)


Suet Chong (Interviews)


Tithi Luadthong (Interviews)


Tomer Hanuka (Interviews)


Tomislav Tikulin (Interviews)


Tommy Arnold (Interviews)

Here's a recent AMA session with the artist.

Victo Ngai (Interviews)

Winner of Society of Illustrators Gold Medal.

Victor Mosquera (Interviews)


Vladimir Manyukhin (Interviews)


Wesley Allsbrook (Interviews)


Will Staehle (Interviews)


Yuko Shimizu (Interviews)


Unknown

Please leave a comment if you know the name of the cover artist of a book in this section. Thank you.

3 comments (may contain spoilers):

  1. Thanks for doing this. I've already decided my Hugo ballot for artists but this is a good way to do a final check.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yuku Shimizu's art for "eyes I dare not meet in dreams" by Sunny Moraine was new even though the story wasn't.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the info. My spreadsheet doesn't have a separate column for image date for exceptions like this (the image inherits the date of the story/issue) so I can't auto-regenerate this page to fix it. Fortunately, Yuko has two other images for 2017 so she still qualifies for the category.

      Delete