Paintings of Fantasy

Fantastic art is a very broad term that includes various artworks with the one thing that combine all of them — depicting imaginary things that doesn't exist in a real world. This style became popular when artists started create illustrations to fantasy books. Hundreds of thousands examples of fantasy paintings and drawings can be found not only at art galleries but on sites like DeviantArt or Flickr where people share their works.

Fantasy artworks — a popular trend of modernity

Fantasy artworks became popular in 20th century with a development of fiction and science fiction books which needed illustrations for covers that could attract attention of public. Some of artists were impressed by Surrealism works and used some ideas from this style in their works.

It would be incorrect to say that fantasy art as a branch of fine art that appeared in 20th century. Fantasy art appeared at the edge of mystical and folkloric motives. As first imaginary artworks can be considered Antique art showing gods and mythology characters. Most of paintings showing religious scenes can also be considered as fantasy art — for example, works of 15-16 century Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, depicting author's vision of moral concepts, paradise and hell can be classified as fantasy.

The most known examples of modern mass culture fantasy art are comics and manga, but artists also create canvas with fantasy motives. Most of fantasy paintings tend to depict:

• imaginary animals;
• fairytale and mythology creatures: elf, gnomes, centaurs etc;
• illustrations to fiction books and movies;
• drawings of planets and worlds that don't exist;
• abstract works in particular subcultures style.

The medium of an artwork can be very different — from traditional oil to mixed media or plastic. The artist is also free to choose the style in which the artwork will be performed, but of the paintings are naturalistic, with no abstractions.

Best examples of fine art at online gallery ART.biz

Our gallery offers for sale various artworks from artists or collectors. Buyers can choose artworks by style, colour, medium, age, country of artist's or painting's origin, size and price. The choice of paintings is so wide that everyone will be able to find a work for own taste and budget.

ART.biz — the choice of real art lovers.