Add new comment

Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop is one of the better books for learning digital painting with Photoshop.

It's published by 3DTotal and follows a somewhat similar style to their Digital Art Masters series of books. It's filled with tutorials that teach the various aspect of digital painting. There are 224-pages and it comes with a pretty plastic slipcase.

The book benefits those already with some basic experience in creating art. You should be able to draw first. The book's goal is to help you make the transition over to digital painting by showing you how you can replicate your traditional techniques digitally. Through the illustrated examples, you can also learn how the techniques required to create them. Intermediate and advanced digital painters should be able to find useful tips in the book too.

Here's the full list of contents:

A Beginner's Guide

Introducing Photoshop's Workspace
Canvas Settings, Scanning, Colors and Brushes
Composition, Perspective and Blocking In
Grayscale, Blending and Using Photographs
Masks and the Wand Tool
Final Touches and Filters

Art Fundamentals

Lighting and Color
Composition
Portraying Emotion
Perspective and Depth
Storytelling

Complete Project - Area 51

From concepts through to the final image

Painting Styles and Approaches

Speed Painting Sci-fi Characters
Speed Painting Sci-fi Landscapes
Painting Over Grayscale
Digital Painting Using Photographs
Fantasy Landscapes

Project Overviews

The Trials of Devotion
Closet Monster
Soul Hunting

Quick Tips

Learn tricks of the trade from industry professionals

Breakdown Gallery

Image analysis – see how artists create their digital paintings

The first section covers the setting up of Photoshop and understanding the interface with regards to digital painting. The author uses Photoshop CS so some of the software features might differ from newer released. But essentially, the basic features should still be around, somewhere.

The second second covers the art fundamentals. That would be things like lighting, composition, etc. The insightful commentary reinforces what makes a good painting.

The next section is on painting styles and covers painting of fantasy and sci-fi scenes, which is type of subject the book focuses on.

There's also a useful section on creating effects and textures, things like clouds, smoke, explosions, trees, skin, fur, metal, etc.

All the tutorials are created by professional artists, such as Nykolai Aleksander, Richard Tilbury, Eric Spray, Weiye Yin and more. They have lots of experience and their commentaries show.

This is a good book on digital painting. Beginners to advanced users should be able to learn a lot.

Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Beginner's Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop - 02