Brian Froud


Brian Froud is an English fantasy illustrator. He is most widely known for his 1978 book Faeries with Alan Lee, and as the conceptual designer of the films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. According to Wired, Froud is "one of the most pre-emiminent visualizers of the world of faerie and folktale".
Froud lives and works in Devon with his wife, Wendy Froud, who is also a fantasy artist. The landscapes in his paintings are frequently inspired by Dartmoor. Froud’s most recent work has been developing the 2019 web television series .

Early life

Froud was born in Winchester, England in 1947, and grew up in Kent. He enrolled as a painter at Maidstone College of Art in 1967, where he graduated with a first class honors diploma in Graphic Design in 1971. While at college, Froud discovered the art of Arthur Rackham, which became a major influence on his own work.

Career

After graduating, Froud spent five years working as a commercial illustrator in Soho, London before moving to Chagford, Devon in 1975. Between 1972 and 1976, he illustrated four books by children's author Margaret Mahy and Are All the Giants Dead? by Mary Norton. In 1976, Froud was featured in Once Upon a Time: Some Contemporary Illustrators of Fantasy, a survey of modern British illustrators. In 1977, Pan Books published an anthology of his artwork, titled The Land of Froud.
In collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Alan Lee, Froud created the 1978 book Faeries, an illustrated compendium of faerie folklore. The idea for the book had come from publisher Ian Ballantine, who had been inspired by the success of the 1977 Dutch-authored book Gnomes. Faeries reached number four on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and in 1981 was adapted into an animated film of the same name.
Froud's artwork in Once Upon a Time and The Land of Froud brought him to the attention of Jim Henson, who sought out Froud to collaborate on his all-puppetry film The Dark Crystal. Froud served as the conceptual designer of The Dark Crystal, released in 1982. The same year, his concept art for the film was published in the companion book The World of the Dark Crystal. Froud was also the conceptual designer for Henson's next feature film, Labyrinth, released in 1986, as well as for Henson's television series The Storyteller, first aired in 1987. Following his collaborations with Henson, Froud's filmography continued; as a designer for the 1989 Japanese animated film ', and as a visual consultant on the 2000 American animated film The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus and P. J. Hogan’s 2003 live-action film Peter Pan.
In the late 1980s, Froud formed an artistic-literary partnership with Terry Jones, who was a screenwriter on Labyrinth. Together they produced The Goblins of Labyrinth, a companion book containing Froud's concept art for the film, and subsequently a number of non-Labyrinth-related books about fairies and goblins. Their Lady Cottington series parodied the Cottingley Fairies phenomenon. For his artwork in the first book of the series, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, Froud won the Hugo Award for Best Original Artwork and the Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration.
In 1991, Froud created over 50 paintings and drawings for his Faerielands series, a collaborative project in which he invited four fantasy authors — Charles de Lint, Patricia A. McKillip, Terri Windling and Midori Snyder — to choose their favourite of his pieces and write stories to go with them, based on the premise that "Faerie, inextricably bound as it is to nature and natural forces, is gravely threatened by the ecological crises that human beings have brought to our world”. The resulting novels were to be published by Bantam Books. However, only de Lint's The Wild Wood and McKillip's Something Rich and Strange were published in 1994 under the banner "Brian Froud's Faerielands" before the project was cancelled.
Froud returned to working with the Jim Henson Company as the primary conceptual designer of the 2019 Netflix series ', a prequel to The Dark Crystal.

Personal life

Froud is married to Wendy Froud, a puppet-maker and sculptor whom he met at the Jim Henson Studios in 1978 while working on The Dark Crystal. The couple married on 31 May 1980, in Chagford. They have a son, Toby, who portrayed the infant of the same name in Labyrinth; he is now an accomplished puppeteer and creature fabricator.

Works

Illustration works

Illustration

In 1979, Froud was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Artwork for Plate 12 of his 1977 book, The Land of Froud. For his 1978 book with Alan Lee, Faeries, Froud won second place in the 1979 Locus Award for Best Art Book. Fairies was also nominated for the 1979 Balrog Award for Best Professional Publication. The same year, Froud was also runner up for the Locus Award for Best Artist.
Four years later, Froud was a nominee at the 1983 Hugo Awards in the category of Best Non-Fiction Book for The World of the Dark Crystal, for which Froud was the illustrator in a partnership with writer J. J. Llewellyn. The World of the Dark Crystal won fifth place in the 1983 Locus Award for Best Nonfiction/Reference Book. The same year, Froud was also nominated for the Balrog Award for Best Artist.
In 1991, Froud was honoured by the World Fantasy Convention with a nomination for the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist.
In 1995, Froud won the Hugo Award for Best Original Artwork for his illustrations in Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, a collaboration with writer Terry Jones. The book also won the Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration, and Froud was also nominated that year for the Chesley Award for Artistic Achievement. For The Wise Woman, Froud won a certificate in the 1995 Spectrum Award for Best Book.
For his illustrations in Terry Windling's novel, The Wood Wife, Froud was nominated for the BSFA Award for Best Artwork in 1998. The following year, for his artwork in Good Faeries/Bad Faeries, another collaboration with Windling, Froud won his second Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration.

Film