World-building by visual artists

[Worldtree]

One way that these expostion-heavy stories like Dinotopia, Furhura, or abiogenesis' really work is by telling their diagrams as part of an explorer's notebook or a nature documentary. They keep their illustrations prominent and make the worldbuilding documentation solidly embedded within the story of the expedition.

It's also interesting to see Avatar's Pandora broken down into a wikipedia group.
http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Pandora
http://www.amazon.com/Avatar-Confidentia...B004Y6MZ7M

...and the planets of the star wars universe
The Illustrated Star Wars Universe by Ralph Mcquarrie
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553374842/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

Wayne Douglas Barlowe's Hell might be relevant to the queen of pain.
http://waynebarlowe.wordpress.com/artwork/hell/
[img]http://waynebarlowe.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/barlowe_sargatanas-before-behemoths.jpg[img]

As well as his great book, Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, which illustrates a variety of extraterrestrials from Classic Science Fiction
http://www.amazon.com/Barlowes-Guide-Ext...899&sr=1-5

Also, there's the Mongoliad- which, while historical, is still a cool group worldbuilding project- mostly text based- by Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, and others. I think the process of recreating a world from the past is very similar to creating a hard sci-fi world, so this is great to look at.
https://mongoliad.com/

..it wouldn't surprise me if James Gurney, on a trip through britain, had sketched the painting then used it as a reference to build his models for lighting purposes.