Technechly Alberto is more famous for animation but I love his background pieces for animation and he is a really good painter.
The man who responsible for the visual foundation of numerous famous film including Tron uprising, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, Spider-Verse and the most recent one an episode from Netflix series Love, Death & Robots. He was approached by much important companies/events such as The Oscar, the Gorillaz show ect
Alberto Mielgo was born and raised in Spain and has lived and worked since he was 18 in Madrid, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and now Los Angeles. He is a self-taught illustrator; he focuses on painting and working in the animation industry. He used to work at Dream Work and Disney for a while and now Alberto just bouncing around different project whereas it is his freelance work or art director for big studios. He really shows himself out there by document about all his major pieces. Since he has already made lots of money from being the art director, painting is more like a way for him to tell a story of his life and he said in his website that if anyone wants to sell a print of his work, email him and he will send the high-resolution version for them.
Alberto’s known for his art direction for ‘The Beatles: Rock Band’, ‘Gorillaz’ projects and for Disney’s ‘Tron Uprising’, for which he received both Emmy and Annie Awards for Best Art Direction in 2013. He said in one interview that:
“I ’, like to paint what I see and what I like, I’m not interested in creating a shocking impact or reflecting political or complex social content with art. I paint very much for myself “
So let talk about his painting first. Alberto does both oil painting and gouache which he often draws women figure who he knows and he named most of his pieces after his models. He treated his painting a bit different between the two media. While his oil painting pieces his more on the pastel and dark colour side, his gouache pieces have more vibrant high light.
As I had said before Alberto commercial work are more in demand and it is not like anything I had seen before especially his recent work for Spider-Verse and Love, Death and Robot. First, what really set him on the map was the Disney animation Tron Uprising in which he creates numerous colouscripts to set the unique style for this fiction pieces. I love every detail he puts in these pieces, a lively mechanical world.
He also did some colours concept, thumbnails for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and he was the art director for the video game Beatless Rockband. Great movements and incredible imagination.
And for the most interesting part, his time working with the movie Spider-Verse. in which he got fired by Sony while they were halfway to finish it. The reason for that is because Alberto has more of an edgy style while Sony prefers a PG-13 movie of a friendly neighbourhood spidy that can reach out more to the audience. So from being the Art Director from day one when they started the project, Sony refers to him as the Visual Consultant. Anyway, when he was working on the project their was a major idea that he sticks to which is ” Something that either accidentally or on purpose I always want to do in my projects is to break the repetitive and very successful “look” and pipeline that all the big Giants Corps in animation had been smashing in our faces for the last decade, up to a point that is difficult to differentiate who did what. ” .Basically, he wants every frame of the animation to look like an illustration which became the core idea of Spider-Verse. Here are some concept illustrations Alberto posted.
His most recent works are one episode in the Netflix series Love, Death and Robot and I think he uses the same design and style from the Sony movie.( Comic line, Comic hand draw frame, vibrant color)
