EDITORIAL

Welcome to issue 45, coming to you from a cooling UK (after a debatable summer), in which we aim to teach you the art of perspective, lighting and composition within our many great tutorial series’ this month!

Darren Yeow is back with us to take us through the painting of a beautiful oriental-style scene which starts from just a simple 3D base knocked up using the free and intuitive software, Google SketchUp (p.50). This is the third tutorial in this series and we’re really pleased with how our artists have been using Google SketchUp in different ways to achieve their own unique goals. We hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve brought you so far and that you’ll learn many new techniques to help speed up your painting by integrating 3D into your workflow over this and our coming issues.

We welcome Björn Hurri to this issue to teach us a thing or two about creating character concept designs from an inside-industry point of view (p.72). Taking the theme of a warrior and a Photoshop paintbrush, he speedily paints for us a character in both an interesting front and back pose – showing us a neat trick of how to quickly get your back pose from the front without too much trouble along the way, too. The importance of Björn’s workshop is all about creating a character that a 3D modeler can easily work from, which is perfect for this series contributed to by professional artists working in the industry, including Darren Yeow and Bruno Werneck. We’ll be discussing dynamic and exaggerated poses next month when we introduce Mark McDonnell to 2DArtist, a designer working for the animation and entertainment industry, and author of the recent book on gesture drawing, The Art & Feel of Making it Real. In the final chapter of the series we’ll be inviting David Smit to share his lessons on camera placement, framing, fore-shortening, and distortion. So plenty to look forward to!

Fans of Nykolai Alexander’s work will be particularly thrilled to see her appear in three great articles this month. Not only is Nykolai taking us through the third chapter of our Beginner’s Guide to Digital Painting series (p.80), but she’s also here to teach and create for us the most stunning set of custom brushes for fabric and lace – shown in demonstration on this month’s cover image (p.62). But even that’s not all! On top of this we also have an exclusive for 2DArtist: an artist-on-artist interview by Nykolai Aleksander who puts the one and only Justin Lassen under the spotlight to find out about his life and plans following his work on the Synaesthesia projects (p.26). This is a beautiful interview featuring work by greats such as Alex Ruiz and John Wallin Liberto, accompanying the soulful responses from CG community legend, Justin Lassen.

Our artist interview is with Guillaume Menuel whose work we have fallen so much in love with that we’ve had to get it printed for the office walls! Guillaume has the ability to turn just a few brushstrokes into a powerful masterpiece, and currently a concept artist for Ubisoft, Quebec City, he took some time away from his digital canvas to satisfy our intrigue. Check out his playful portfolio on p.6 for a generous helping of inspiration!

We feature Cliff Childs in our Sketchbook article this month, who has currently just returned from an internship at Sony Santa Monica Studios. Delve into this up-and-coming artist’s sketchbook on p.18 for tips on how to keep your concepts original and exciting, and then be sure to hop on over to our “making of” featuring the uniquely titled image, Hovercraft Parrot, on p.92, by David Munoz Velazquez – a truly inspired image from a fantastic portfolio that we’re excited to learn a little more about!

I shall leave you to discover the Gallery and get cracking with your own masterpieces! See you next month for more where this came from.

Ed.

Product details
Author: 3DTotal.com Ltd
Format: DOWNLOAD ONLY PDF
Size: 148 MB
Pages: 102

Interview
Guillaume Menuel - Concept artist at Ubisoft

Article
The sketchbook of Cliff Childs
Interview with Justin Lassen

Gallery
10 of the best 2D artworks

Tutorial series
Using 3D as a base for 2D painting - Part 3
Custom Brushes - Chapter 2: Fabrics and Lace
Dynamic Characters: Enhancing your Character Concepts - Part 3: Speed Painting and Concept Design
Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting by Nykolai Aleksander - Part 3

Making Of
Hovercraft Parrot - Project Overview by David Munoz Velazquez

Promotion
Digital Art Masters: V4 - Free book chapter promotion