Enrico Valenza, also known as "EnV" on the web, is an Italian freelance illustrator, mainly collaborating with publishers such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti as a cover artist for sci-fi and fantasy books. He graduated from Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and was later a student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.
When he started to work, computers weren't that common and he spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustrations with traditional media, usually on cardboard; particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertisement works till the moment "Jurassic Park" came to theaters; then, he decided to buy a computer and try the "computer graphics" that everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught in many aspects of CG, it was his encounter with the open source philosophy that actually opened a brand new world of possibilities; in particular, Blender.
In 2005 he won the "Suzanne Awards" for "Best animation, original idea and story" with the animation "New Penguoen 2.38". In 2006 he joined the Orange Team in Amsterdam for the two last weeks of production, to help in finalizing the shots of the first open source CG animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, "Elephants Dream". In 2007 - 2008 he was Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of "Big Buck Bunny", the second Blender Foundation open movie. In 2010 - 2011 he was Art Director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the "Museo della Città di Bologna" project, which was the production of a stereoscopic CG animated documentary made in Blender and explaining Bologna's city history.
For Packt Publishing, he's currently also writing Blender 2.7 3D Modeling Cookbook about the complete work-flow in Blender to build from A to Z an animated fantasy monster character. Being also a "Blender Certified Trainer", he collaborates as a CG artist with Italian production studios that have decided to switch their pipeline to using open source tools.
