Sarah Weizhen Xu is an artist residing in the US. She spent years studying the traditional realism oil painting, but now, she is pursuing the career of becoming a CG artist, believing that the combination of the traditional academic discipline and modern technology would be a great idea.

Being raised in a family that placed great emphasis on learning art as a means to further ones growth, Sarah has been exploring with pencils and brushes since she was 4 years old. At the age of 10 she began Russian style academic fine art training in a private art studio.

Early in 2017, Sarah decided to pursue her dream of becoming a Contemporary Realism Artist, she started her full time study at The Florence Academy of Art.

Throughout her education she was awarded several scholarships and awards including: the 3rd place at the ARC 20th Annual international Scholarship competition, Final List at the 15th and 14th International ARC Salon competition, the “Best Student” winner of the bimonthly PleinAir Art Salon Competition, The 22th Art of the Portrait Conference Scholarship, and Finalist at The CFA Artist of the Year Award.

Being a big fan of J.R.R.Tolkien’s fictions, she created tons of illustrations for the fiction characters and stories over the years, and was honored as “the Prime Illustrator” for “The Lord of the Rings, the Chinese Wiki” website.

Her work has exhibited internationally. The training from the Florence Academy of Art gave Sarah a solid foundation of capturing the accuracy from life, and a thorough understanding of the old masters’ painting methods. Her dream is to be able to paint large multi-figure narrative illustrational art works, like what Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Lourens Alma Tadema did, yet she also merge the elements of contemporary art into her paintings, which makes her own unique style.

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