Research

Found this site http://livlily.blogspot.hu/ , which has a pretty good collection of concepts and art from many animated films. It really shows the progression of characters, layout, background and even pencil test.

I also was looking through this list of well known 2D and 3D Artist that worked in films, games and animation. Thier work was pretty inspiring since they all have thier own style.

Concept Design / 2D Aritst

1. Feng Zhu – Absurdly prolific environment master with a cool, loose style.
2. Dylan Cole - Another top tier environment artist.
3. James Paick – Environment design.
4. Ryan Church – Environment & Vehicle design.
5. Scott robertson – Industrial design, vehicles, mechs.
6. Cecil Kim – Environments.
7. Thierry “Barontierie” Doizon – Generalist, very painterly.
8. James Clyne – Mechanical and environment design.
9. Adam Adamowicz – Recently deceased Bethesda concept artist behind Skyrim and Fallout 3. He had a style all his own.
10. Andree Wallin - One of my favorites. Mostly environments and mattes.
11. Dave Rapoza - Character artist with rendering skills right up there with Frazetta himself.
12. Noah Bradley - Environment artist with a knack for dramatic lighting.

 3D Artists

1. Neville Page – Poncept sculpting/character design (Avatar, Tron, Star Trek).
2. Scott Patton – Concept sculpting/creature design (Avatar, John Carter). He and Neville pretty much paved the way for ZBrush as a design tool.
3. Scott Eaton – Classical anatomy sculpture, ecorche. His anatomy style is probably my favorite in the industry.
4. Alex Alvarez – Creature sculpture, founder of Gnomon, and one of the men directly responsible for the wealth of good online CG training we enjoy today.
5. Wayne Robson – Mudbox master, environment artist, plugin writer, and FXPHD instructor.
6. Marek Denko - One of the reigning gods of photo-realism.
7. Carlos Ortega Elizalde - More CGChoice Awards than you can shake a stick at. Really good with stylization, materials, and composition.
8. Cesar Dracol – Creature Sculpture.
9. Ryan Kingslien - Anatomy instruction.
10. Kevin Johnstone - Extraordinary Gears of War environment artist.
11. Stefan Morell - His industrial environments are stellar. Also, he's a pretty great texture artist.
12. Pedro Conti - Really fantastic stylized work.
13. Manano Steiner - His Richard McDonald study from a few years ago is one of my favorite ZBrush pieces ever.
14. Victor Hugo Queiroz - One of the best toon modelers out there!
15. Jose Alves de Silva - Also one of the best toon modelers out there! (Seriously, it's impossible to choose between these two guys).
16. Allesandro Baldassarioni - His piece, "Toon Soldier" is wonderful.
17. Andrew Hickinbottom - CG pinups galore!
18. Mike Nash - Lot of impressive hard-surface pieces. (NSFW)
19. Joseph Drust - Insane hard-surface ZBrush stuff.
20. Hanno Hagedorn - His work for Uncharted 2 is mind-blowing.
21. Jonathan Romeo - Really lovely character work.
22. Rebeca Puebla - Stylized models rendered really realistically.
23. Tor Frick - A low-poly/optimization master. Recently made waves, creating an incredible game level with a single 512px texture sheet.