Tuesday, January 22, 2019

2019 Professional Artists

To help people make nominations for the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, we have set up a "lightbox" system to let fans quickly flip through over 300 works by over 100 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.
  4. Once you've looked at all the pictures, go through the tabs you opened. For most artists there's a link to their 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 40 MB total.

Note: Thumbnail images with a highlighted link are professional works done in 2018. 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. All artists here have at least one work from 2018, with a max of six total, usually the most recent.

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 2018 that make them eligible for the 2019 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 2018.

Some of the art consists of book covers from the "year's best" science fiction and fantasy novels meta-list collated by John DeNardo at Kirkus Reviews. There are many many more books and magazines published in 2018 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 SF/F Ballots.


1. Adam Tredowski (Interviews)


2. Alan Bao (Interviews)


3. Alan M. Clark (Interviews)


4. Alejandro Colucci (Interviews)


5. Alyssa Winans (Interviews)


6. Amy Sol (Interviews)


7. Andrey Kiselev (Interviews)


8. Anna and Elena Balbusso (Interviews)


9. Anna Dittmann (Interviews)


10. Anxo Amarelle (Interviews)


11. Armando Veve (Interviews)


12. Arthur Haas (Interviews)


13. Artur Sadlos (Interviews)


14. Ashley Mackenzie (Interviews)


15. Audrey Benjaminsen (Interviews)


16. Benedick T. Bana (Interviews)


17. Bob Eggleton (Interviews)

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

18. Brent Hardy-Smith (Interviews)


19. Charlotte Stroomer (Interviews)


20. Chase Henson (Interviews)


21. Chris Buzelli (Interviews)


22. Chris McGrath (Interviews)


23. Christopher Doll (Interviews)

Note: ISFDB shows the book published in 2015 but the cover art is copyright 2014 so it may be ineligible.

24. Cliff Nielsen (Interviews)


25. Cory and Catska Ench (Interviews)


26. CreativeSoul Photography (Interviews)


27. Dadu Shin (Interviews)


28. Daniele Serra (Interviews)


29. David Palumbo (Interviews)


30. Don Seymour (Interviews)


31. Donato Giancola (Interviews)


32. Eldar Zakirov (Interviews)


33. Elizabeth Leggett (Interviews)

Winner of the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist.

34. Feifei Ruan (Interviews)


35. FORT (Interviews)

FORT is a studio, not a person

36. Fred Gambino (Interviews)


37. Galen Dara (Interviews)

Art of SFF: Galen Dara’s Daring Style

38. Godwin Akpan (Interviews)


39. GoΓ±i Montes (Interviews)


40. Greg Ruth (Interviews)

The Wrong Track that Leads to the Right One

41. Helen Ilnytska (Interviews)


42. Jaime Jones (Interviews)


43. Jamie Stafford-Hill (Interviews)


44. Jan Wessbecher (Interviews)


45. Jasu Hu (Interviews)


46. Jeff Brown (Interviews)


47. Jeffrey Alan Love (Interviews)

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

48. Joel Chaim Holtzman (Interviews)


49. Joel Iskowitz (Interviews)


50. John Picacio (Interviews)


51. Jon Foster (Interviews)


52. Joshua Meehan (Interviews)


53. Jun Cen (Interviews)


54. Jungshan (Interviews)


55. Justin Adams (Interviews)


56. Keith Negley (Interviews)


57. Kim Myatt (Interviews)


58. Kyle Stecker (Interviews)


59. Luis Carlos BarragΓ‘n (Interviews)


60. Lyra Alice Schneider (Interviews)


61. Marcel Mercado (Interviews)


62. Mark Smith (Interviews)


63. Martin Deschambault (Interviews)


64. Mary Haasdyk (Interviews)


65. Maurizio Manzieri (Interviews)


66. May & Sin (Interviews)


67. Micah Epstein (Interviews)


68. Michael Garland (Interviews)


69. Mondolithic Studios (Interviews)


70. Mycoolsites (Interviews)


71. NASA (Interviews)


72. Nicolas Delort (Interviews)


73. Nigel Cattlin (Interviews)


74. Pascal Blanche (Interviews)


75. Pat Presley (Interviews)


76. Peter Lutjen (Interviews)


77. Raphael Lacoste (Interviews)


78. Reiko Murakami (Interviews)


79. Rich Deas (Interviews)


80. Richard Anderson (Interviews)


81. Ron Miller (Interviews)


82. Ronnie Jensen (Interviews)


83. Rovina Cai (Interviews)


84. Saleha Chowdhury (Interviews)


85. Sam Araya (Interviews)


86. Sam Schechter (Interviews)


87. Samuel Araya (Interviews)


88. Sarah Anne Langton (Interviews)


89. Scott Bakal (Interviews)


90. Sean Andrew Murray (Interviews)


91. Shutterstock (Interviews)


92. Spencer Fuller (Interviews)


93. Stacey Robinson (Interviews)


94. Stephen Mulcahey (Interviews)


95. Stephen Youll (Interviews)


96. Tomislav Tikulin (Interviews)


97. Tommy Arnold (Interviews)

Here's a recent AMA session with the artist.

98. Victo Ngai (Interviews)

Winner of Society of Illustrators Gold Medal.

99. Vinz El Tabanas (Interviews)


100. Waiji Choo (Interviews)


101. Will Staehle (Interviews)


102. 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.

1 comment (may contain spoilers):

  1. Doug Wheatley for the illustrations in Fire & Blood by George RR Martin
    Foundryside cover by Wil Staehle.

    ReplyDelete