My name is Enrico Valenza and I’m an italian freelance illustrator and CG artist known on the web as “EnV”.

I graduated at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona and I have been student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.

By working since 1988 as freelance illustrator for advertising and publishing, I mastered traditional painting techniques (pastels, inks, gouaches, acrilics, ecoline, watercolors, oils, airgraph and all of them as mixed media) and later I started to use also computer graphic.

I’ve been teaching illustration and graphic design in several italian art schools and I’m a Blender trainer both for companies and private clients.

In 2005 I won the Blender’s Suzanne Awards for “Best Animation, original idea and story” with the animation New Penguoen 2.38, you can see it also here and here is a making of.
In 2006 I joined as 3D generalist the Orange Team in Amsterdam, to help for the two last weeks of production in helping to finalize the shots of the first Blender Foundation open short movie Elephants Dream.
In 2007 I’ve been selected as lead artist to be in the team for the project Peach, spending six months at the Blender Institute in Amsterdam to work on their second open cg animated short movie Big Buck Bunny.

At the end of 2009 I’ve been contacted by CINECA (Bologna) to be the art director for the production of the stereoscopic short movie Apa alla scoperta di Bologna for the Museo della Città di Bologna project.

In 2012 I’ve been asked to write a Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook for PACKT Publishing.
In 2015 I wrote an update: Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook – Third Edition.
In 2015, for the same publisher, I wrote also the Blender 3D Cookbook, a manual about the complete workflow to create from scratch a character in Blender.

I collaborated with Studio Bozzetto at the production of the Topo Tip (Tip the Mouse) italian television series, modeling almost the half of the characters of the show and painting several asset textures, with Arx Anima in Vienna as senior character modeler and with DogHead Animation as senior 3D environment / set artist for animated features currently still in production.

As freelance illustrator I collaborated with italian publishers like Demetra/Giunti, Edizioni del Baldo, Gribaudo, Piemme, Albero del Mistero and Mondadori Ragazzi for educational, fantasy, horror and science-fiction books.

Currently I’m still making illustrations for book covers, I’m writing manuals and holding training courses about production in Blender but also about drawing and painting, both digitally and on paper.