Feng Zhu's concept art and digital art tutorials

October 29, 2013 9:15 AM

Feng Zhu is a concept artist who has worked with a number of big name movies and video games, and has opened a design school in Singapore. With the general background out of the way, here's his website with hundreds if vivid pieces of concept art to stimulate your brain (*cough cough*NaNoWriMo*cough cough*), and a long list of free tutorial videos that have been included in at least one list of best free digital painting tutorials.

If you want to know more about Feng Zhu, here's a lengthy interview from 2009, and another from 2010.

If you're interested in more large-scale art from him, you can search his blog for links to high res images, or you can browse a Google Images search for larger images.

And if you want more in-depth tutorials, he has a few for sale at the Gnomon Workshop, covering his techniques and concept design.

posted by filthy light thief (9 comments total)

Oh man, this stuff is gorgeous. Time to change the wallpaper...thanks, filthy light thief!
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:58 AM on October 29, 2013

Many of the image on his main page are mid-level resolution, so they might turn out blurry or pixelated when scaled up for a full desktop image, but you can hunt around and find larger copies of some of his images. But now that I've tried out this image as a desktop, the pixelation makes it feel like background art from a video game, which makes me immensely happy.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:10 AM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is some fantastic stuff.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:06 AM on October 29, 2013

Hey, Roadside Picnic! Is someone making a movie out of that? Not sure whether that would be wonderful or terrible.
posted by echo target at 11:21 AM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

If those two images are referring to the short Russian science fiction novel, it sounds (and looks) fascinating.

And it appears that the text on the images says "Roadside Picnic | Stalkers End (or Find?) Abstract," which could be a reference to the Soviet film Stalker (1971), or the Ukranian S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games

Yup, based on both
posted by filthy light thief at 11:40 AM on October 29, 2013

In my rush to add links, I didn't include much detail to my prior comment. I should clarify (in case any of the above links die): the last link is to "Character design demo from today's class. Based on characters from the 1971 book ,Roadside Picnic - which was also the heavy influence behind the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.," so it would make sense that he also did some demo or in-class work on scenery design based on the book and games, assuming he hasn't seen the film.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:49 AM on October 29, 2013

It's interesting seening the Roadside Picnic stuff because in one Feng Zhu's videos he talks about and encourages artists to read for inspiation, mentioning sf classics like 1984

I've been thinking of doing a mega post on digital art when I'm less but while I'm here, as well as Feng Zhu I'll recommned Sycra and Daarken (and Control Paint which starts right at the beginning)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:20 PM on October 29, 2013 [3 favorites]

If you like this sort of thing, I can recommend Concept Ships. But yeah, Feng Zhu is incredible. Excellent execution on hundreds and hundreds of amazing ideas.
posted by Happy Dave at 2:35 AM on October 30, 2013

Here's a recent blog post from Zhu featuring some concept art from the (proposed) video game Dune: Ancient Sands.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:48 AM on November 25, 2013