About the Author

Enrico Valenza, also known as "EnV," on the Web is an Italian freelance illustrator who mainly collaborates with publishers such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti as a cover artist for science fition and fantasy books.

He graduated from Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona, Italy, and was later a student of Giorgio Scarato, an illustrator and painter.

When he started to work, computers weren't very common. He spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustration with traditional media, usually on cardboard. At that time, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertisements.

When the movie Jurassic Park was released, he decided to buy a computer and try out the computer graphics that everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught for what concerns the many aspects of CG, it was his encounter with the open source philosophy that actually opened up a brand new world of possibilities—Blender in particular.

In 2005, Enrico won the Suzanne Award for Best Animation, Original Idea, or Story, for the movie New Penguoen 2.38. In 2006, he joined the Orange team in Amsterdam for two weeks. He helped them in finalizing the shots of Elephants Dream, the first open source animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation.

In 2007 and 2008, Enrico was the lead artist in the Peach Project team for the production of Big Buck Bunny, Blender Foundation's second open movie. In 2010 and 2011, he was the art director at CINECA in Bologna, Italy, for the Museo della Città di Bologna project. This was the production of a stereoscopic, computer-graphics-animated documentary made in Blender explaining the history of Bologna.

For Packt Publishing, Enrico is also writing Blender 2.7 3D Modeling Cookbook, which explains the complete workflow in Blender to build an animated fantasy monster. Being a Blender Certified Trainer, he often collaborates as a CG artist with production studios that decide to switch their pipeline to open source.

Enrico uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration work, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3D package, more often as a starting point for painting with other open source applications. He has done several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.