Enrico Valenza, also known on the Web as "EnV", 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 at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and later was a student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.
When he started to work, computers weren't that popular among the masses, and he spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustrations with traditional media, usually on cardboards. Particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertising work.
But this was only until the moment Jurassic Park came to the theaters: he then decided to buy a computer and try his hand at this "computer graphic" thing everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught in the 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 for the last two weeks of production in Amsterdam, to help in finalizing the shots of the first open source CG-animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, named Elephants Dream.
From 2007 to 2008, he was a Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of Big Buck Bunny, the Blender Foundation's second open movie.
From 2010 to 2011, he was an Art Director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the Museo della Città di Bologna project, that is, the production of a stereoscopic CG-animated documentary made in Blender and explaining Bologna's history.
Being also a Blender Certified Trainer, he collaborates as a CG artist with Italian production studios that have decided to switch their pipeline to the open source.
He uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration jobs, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3D package, more often as a starting point for painting over with other open source applications such as The Gimp or, more recently, MyPaint.
He has presented several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.