Todd Lockwood was born in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Lockwood received his education at The Art Institute of Colorado, in Denver, Colorado, and went to work immediately in the design and advertising world.

Lockwood worked for a design agency for a year and a half, and won numerous awards in the Art Directors Club of New York’s annual show. He then focused his career on illustration, doing freelance illustration for about fifteen years: “Coors was one of my biggest clients… I could paint beer cans in my sleep. At one point I had some covers I had done for Satellite Orbit magazine. For years after that I was ‘the satellite dish guy.’ I came to really hate satellite dishes and beer cans. If I had ever had a painting with both a beer can and a satellite dish in it, my ad career would have been complete.”

Lockwood was an avid Dungeons & Dragons game player, and a fan of fantasy art. “I flipped when TSR started having really good art in their products… Jeff Easley’s stuff particularly interested me: so moody and fluid, so deft. Then Brom came along and really blew my doors off.”Lockwood decided to try fantasy and science-fiction illustration: “My first artistic influence, like so many in this field, was Frank Frazetta.