Luc Desmarchelier is an art dierctor at Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as a concept and visual development artist who has also done work for DreamWorks Animation and Amblimation/Universal Studios.

Desmarchelier maintains two blogs, Ushusia, which showcases his professional work, and harmattan, which is devoted to his personal projects, paintings and sketches.

He doesn’t include much biographical information on either, but you can see his professional film credits on the IMDB.

His concept art pieces, in pencil, watercolor, gouache and acrylic as well as digitally painted, are evocative, atmospheric and wonderfully textural, with a marvelous sense of place, season and time of day. His professional blog also includes sketches and the final piece for his contribution to the Totoro Forest Project (image above, top right, see my post on the Totoro Forest Project.)

Thumbing back through his blog posts takes you not only through several films, but through numerous locations that feel like a kind of travel adventure.

In his personal blog, the travel and places are real, and beautifully expressed; particularly in his directly observed but poetically rendered Moleskine sketchbook watercolors (image above, bottom).

You will also find figure studies, and paintings in acrylic and oil, as well as digital sketches in Painter and Photoshop, of subjects and places both real and imagined.