Please welcome our newest featured artist, Lokman Lam. Lokman is a freelance illustrator from Hong Kong, with a penchant for sexy stylized female characters. Check out his gallery!

ImagineFX has posted a new PDF tutorial on Painting a Realistic Nose, by Katarina Sokalova:

The nose is one of the most difficult elements of portrait painting, but Katarina Sokalova has some advice to make life easier…

With a deadline of January 31st, the time has come to submit your art for publication in the next edition of It’s Art Magazine. The challenge is to depict a winter scene. In addition to being published, winners will receive free subscriptions to future releases of the magazine.

Massive Black has released another set of videos, this time from artist Whit Brachna, aka Mr. Blonde. Whit explores creating a ‘Non-SciFi’ interior environment, from thumbnails to the finished product. He also makes use of a simple 3d model from Google Sketchup to lay out basic perspective and initial lighting.

Whit is a student of the Concept Art Atelier and currently works for Massive Black, based in San Francisco, with satellite studios in Shanghai and Bangkok. As usual, we are provided with the Photoshop .PSD files, Sketchup renders, and the final full-res image. Prices for these tutorials will go up to $14 after Jan 1st, still a great value and well below the industry norm.

For the full experience, be sure to purchase both Part 1 and Part 2.

We’re excited to welcome a new Featured Artist, James Paick.

James is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from Los Angeles, CA, with a background in the games industry. Once we saw his wonderfully detailed and colored environments, we knew he had to be a part of Sketchfeed. But don’t take our word for it, check out his impressive gallery and let the art speak for itself.

Good news for Tolkien fans. It seems Peter Jackson and New Line Cinemas have finally put aside their squabbling and have agreed to produce two movies based on The Hobbit. The LOTR trilogy sent shock waves through the visual arts industries with the extensive use of illustration, concept art, and matte paintings during the production process as well as included in the final film. It will be interesting to see what we have in store for the next installment of Middle Earth. Pre-production will start immediately with release dates scheduled for 2010 and 2011.

Read the press release for details, or check out the official movie blog.

A few links to cover Monday’s news items.

• 2D Artist Magazine, published via PDF download, has released it’s December 2007 issue.
• It’s Art Magazine is running a 3-part concept series by artist Daniel Arnold-Mist, using a combination of tools including Painter, ZBrush and and Maya. Part 1 and Part 2 are online now.
• MyToons is running a contest with a $7000 cash prize award for the best animated commercial.
• ImagineFX has a new workshop on Dark Fantasy Painting with JP Targete.