From the Concept Art Division
Those first two images are of the first art book I ever owned. My dad was always on the look out for interesting books to get my young imagination fired up. He found Wayne Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials at a used book store and gave it to me when I was about 10. It was an instant treasure. I flipped through that book so much it fell apart. My solution was to punch holes in it and put it in a 3 ring binder. Even then, the book was loved to near death. (I have no idea what happened to the cover).
A few years later I discovered a second alien book called Expedition which blew my teenage mind away again and altered the way I think about creative projects. If you were to sequence and map my creative genome you'd find a strand of Barlow in my DNA.
Recently I discovered Barlowe worked on one of my favorite films: Avatar.
I'm not sure how 12 years went by without me knowing this. I guess I never checked out the Art of Avatar book, which is a terrible oversight on my part. Won't happen again, I promise you that.
All of this to say, Barlowe is one of the greats, he's a bottomless well of inspiration, and you should familiarize yourself with his trippy, beautiful/ugly, and otherworldly art if you haven't already.
More on his website: LINK
(Also, he helped design the Kaiju in Pacific Rim!)
-Jake