Richard Anderson (artist)


Richard Anderson is an American concept artist, illustrator, and painter. He won the Gold Spectrum Award in 2011, the Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design for a Fantasy Film in 2015, and he was the final person to win the Gemmell Award for Best Fantasy Cover Art.
He has created artwork used on dozens of book covers, concept art used in the production of several films, and has worked both freelance and for specific companies in his career.

Biography

Richard Anderson is a native of Montana, where he lived in a trailer house. He began drawing when he was young, and had difficulty in school. After graduating high school, he began attending The Art Institute of Seattle, where he graduated after focusing on his drawing.
In 2003, he began working as an artist at NCSoft, where he worked on the Guild Wars games. After working at NCSoft for eight-and-a-half years, he moved to MPC, where he worked through 2011. He won the 2011 Gold Spectrum Award in the Institutional category for Knight March, and he has since been included multiple times in Spectrum. He then worked at Framestore until October 2013, after which he began working for Rocksteady Studios.
He was nominated for the 2014 BSFA Award for Best Artwork for The Mirror Empire. Along with other members of the art department, he won the Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design for a Fantasy Film in 2015 for his work as a senior concept artist on the film Guardians of the Galaxy.
Anderson was nominated in 2016 for the Chesley Award for Best Cover Illustration – Hardcover for The Dinosaur Lords. That same year, Anderson was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. In 2018, he was the final person to win the Gemmell Award for Best Fantasy Cover Art for Kings of the Wyld.
He also does freelance work through is studio, Flaptraps Art. He uses standard sketches on paper for some projects, but he also uses a Cintiq tablet so he can work directly in Photoshop from the beginning. He also uses 3D tools like SketchUp, Maya, 3ds Max, and modo in his visualization work.

Works

Cover art

Anderson created the cover art for the following:

Films

Anderson worked as a concept artist on the following films:
He worked as a digital artist on The Kid Who Would Be King in 2019.

Reception

Anderson's work has been described as "explosive, energy to every line", "raw, colourful" and "tense and mature...". Sarah Gailey, the author of River of Teeth, stated "is covers are dynamic and gorgeous... a world in broad, luminous strokes."

Awards and honors

YearOrganizationAward title,
Category		WorkResultRefs
2011Spectrum Fantastic ArtSpectrum Award,
Institutional		Knight March
2014British Science Fiction AssociationBSFA Award,
Best Artwork		The Mirror EmpireNomitated
2015Art Directors GuildArt Directors Guild Award,
Excellence in Production Design for a Fantasy Film		Guardians of the GalaxyWon
2016Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy ArtistsChesley Award,
Best Cover Illustration – Hardcover		The Dinosaur LordsNomitated
2016World Fantasy ConventionWorld Fantasy Award,
Artist		-Nomitated
2018Gemmell AwardsGemmell Award,
Best Fantasy Cover Art		Kings of the WyldWon