Raphael Lacoste is an illustrator, visual development artist and art director for the gaming and film industries.
He is currently working with Ubisoft as Brand Art Director for the Assasin’s Creed franchise, which is noted for its beautiful environments.
Lacoste’s other gaming credits include: Prince of Persia: The sands of Time and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. He has also worked as a matte painter and designer for feature films like Terminator: Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jupiter Ascending and Repo Men.
Lacoste’s website features galleries of his work in several areas. He works digitally, primarily in Photoshop, and his images make beautiful use of atmospheric perspective and severely limited palettes. Some of his digital paintings seem almost monochromatic when you look at them in detail, but never feel artificially restricted in color range. In others, he uses to great effect the highlighting of key elements in a semi-monochromatic composition with the scheme’s complementary color.
You can see in his work an admiration for 18th and 19th century artists like JMW Turner, Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich.
Lacoste has an instructional DVD on Digital Environment Painting from Gnomon Workshop, also available through Amazon.
[Via CGHub]
