Fangorn

About Fangorn

Fangorn is the working name of Chris Baker (born 1960), a British painter and illustrator best known for the cover art of Brian Jacques's Redwall novels and for concept art and storyboards for Stanley Kubrick and Tim Burton films.

Baker was born on 17 August 1960 in Birmingham and trained at Bournville School of Art. He took his pseudonym from Fangorn Forest in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the early 1990s he painted game covers and White Dwarf magazine covers for Games Workshop, and he drew graphic novel adaptations of David Gemmell's Legend and Waylander.

For the Redwall series he painted the covers of most of the books from Mossflower and Mattimeo through Salamandastron, Martin the Warrior, The Pearls of Lutra and The Long Patrol to The Taggerung, as well as the tenth-anniversary edition of Redwall. For Marlfox (1998), The Legend of Luke and Lord Brocktree (2000) he supplied interior illustrations as well as the covers.

His film work began as a concept artist on Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and continued on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Road to Perdition (2002), Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003), Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (both 2005), and Skyfall (2012). His cover for Ian Whates's Wourism and Other Stories won the 2019 BSFA Award for best artwork.

For collectors

Wikipedia credits him as cover artist of Marlfox (Hutchinson, 1998) and Lord Brocktree (Hutchinson, 2000), and he also drew interior illustrations for both books. The American editions were published by Philomel.