Lorenzo Sperlonga (b.1969)

Lorenzo Sperlonga was born in 1969 in Rome, Italy. He studied illustration, graphic design and animation at the Roberto Rossellini's Italian Institute for Cinematography and Television in Rome. In 1989, after a short time at the Valeri Visual Arts, he started working at Lapis Graphic Design where he worked until 1997, developing advertising campaigns, illustrations, storyboards and interior design.

Lorenzo Sperlonga.

From 1992 to 1993 he worked with Vallardi Publishing for the child-orientated fairy tales comic book Tiramolla and the TV magazine Sattellite, painting cover illustrations and caricatures.

1994 marked the beginning of his career as a pin-up illustrator and he painted his first cover for Skorpio, published by Eura, one of the biggest comic publishers in Italy. In the same year he also started working with Playmen Comix and other titles in the adult industry.

In 1995 he painted illustrations for the Italian editions of Playboy and Penthouse.

During the 1990s he also collaborated as a production designer and background painter with Airone, Farmtoons, Matita Animata and Musicartoon for various different animation features.

In 1995 in Los Angeles, he met Heavy Metal publisher Kevin Eastman and together discussed the possibilities of his working in the American market. Five years later his first cover for Heavy Metal was out in the US.

In 1998, he moved to Los Angeles and started working for Larry Flynt Publications. There, he drew and painted his first comic, Angel Baby. Seven burning pages of highly erotic content written by Bruce David. Even today, his illustrations appear periodically in Hustler. During this time, he was still working for Farmtoons and selling his paintings to Skorpio and Lanciostory in Italy. He had not forgotten his first calling as graphic designer and he started to collaborate and design for a big exotic fashion company in Hollywood called Forplay.

At the end of 1999 he secured a contact with Jim Pinto of AEG (Alderac Entertainment Group) and started producing a large number of illustrations for fantasy and western card games. In the meantime, NBM published one of his paintings for the cover of Sizzle.

With the new millennium, Dreamstone started publishing posters of his artwork in Australia. An important collaboration began with Avalanche Press and he painted a cover for the fantasy game Greenland. From there, he became the main cover artist for Avalanche.

In 2002, two further covers were published for Heavy Metal, which also featured one of his paintings in the calendar. Heavy Metal dedicated a gallery to his work and started printing posters of his pin-up girls. Soon after, a collaboration with the Tamara Bane Gallery in Los Angeles began and MG Publishing released world-wide his first book, The Art of Lorenzo Sperlonga.