Marcos Mateu-Mestre graciously signed our copies at San Diego Comic-Con 2025!

From the publisher:

New from the animator and illustrator behind your favorite DreamWorks and Netflix films, the next installment of the Framed series will help creators design a world that comes to life.

Framed Environment Design presents the artwork, wisdom, and philosophies behind designing environments for film, animation, graphic novels, and illustration so that they serve a narrative purpose and become part of the story. With informed methodology and special care for the smallest details, environment design can inspire script visualization, making it come alive in meaningful ways—together with the characters—as part of the same actions and emotions.

From historical epic to futuristic architecture, and natural environments to fantasy scenarios, in this newest addition to his best-selling Framed series, Mateu-Mestre illuminates the full process in great detail. Starting with the early research stages and thought process all the way to the final design—employing hundreds of carefully created and never-before-seen illustrations and sketches—the reader can not only follow the detailed explanations but actually make sense of them through an incredible array of visual ideas and solutions.

Born in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, Marcos Mateu-Mestre is a visual concept, traditional animation layout, and graphic novel artist with 25 years of experience in feature animation. Some of his film credits include Balto, The Prince of Egypt, Asterix and the Vikings, Surf's Up, and How to Train your Dragon 2. His work in film, primarily for DreamWorks Animation and Sony Pictures Animation, has been focused on both the design and cinematic aspects of frame composition, lighting, and visual continuity of many key animation sequences, experience he summed up in his international best-selling book Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers. In addition to his work in film, he has taught drawing, illustration, and visual storytelling techniques for 12 years and been a member of several international film festivals. Mateu-Mestre currently lives in Los Angeles.