Digital-Painting books

A short review in bad fren-glish !

3D Total books

When I started to play around with digital-art, I never even thought about opening a  method book. Same thing with video tutorials, and even more with traditional drawing books such as « How to draw a character » or « How to paint hair perfectly ». As logical as it sound to me, it does not seems to be for every beginners: you learn by doing it ! By experimenting and finding your own way to create pictures. Try, observe, study… but always with the pen in your hand. Life drawing is the key, softwares are tools.

I approached digital-art in the same way. I never learnt anything during my Master program because digital was just appearing at this point. And the only « art » pieces I could see were these crapy « I use filters and layer modes to obtain a piece of work incredibly unique ».

A few years later, I started to use Gimp, to colorize my sketches. Then I slowly started to work digital from scratch. I used Gimp for 7 years and I just recently switched to Photoshop and Painter. Even if I consider Gimp as a great soft, I definitely needed to go for a smoother and faster program.
My point is that the program does not really matter, as long as it helps you to reach the result you want. Gimp did the job to a certain point.

As I said, I learnt everything by myself and I think this is the best way to do it when you have time for it. But today things changed for me, and I became an instructor. Wich highly contradict my precedent statement ! Now I have to teach to my « beginner-level students » how to work with the digital medium, and I have to do it in a 4 month time-frame !

So the deal is to communicate , during this time-frame, all the skills that I developped during 10 years, a little bit of passion, and an accurate vision of « how does the professionnal field works ».

To condense a maximum amount of knowledge in such a short time-frame, I decided to support my classes with some books. Not some books that I was going to follow step by step, but some books containing a maximum amount of tips and ideas. Some books that my student would be able to read by themselves … and take whatever they want from it !

I spent some time looking for it, and here is the best ones I found: the « 3D TOTAL » collection.

So here is the set of books that I would recommand, as a support for your practice.

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Beginner’s Guide to Digital Painting

Sketches, colors, composition, lights, textures, use of photographs or 3D models, speed-painting, brushes … everything is in it. With some « step-by-step » projects, developped by professionnals.
This book is the perfect one to start with, as a « side reference ». It’s full of tips and essential notions, explained really simply, with a lot of good and accurate examples.

The end of the book focuses on some basic techniques to paint some random typical effects: smoke, clouds, fire, mountains, grass, water, skin, body parts, etc …

This is the book I’m going to recommand to my students.

http://shop.3dtotal.com/books/3dtotalpublishing/beginners-guide-digital-painting

Digital Painting Techniques (Vol 1, 2, 3)

I really enjoyed going through the « Digital Painting Techniques Vol 1″ !
Simply, this collection seems to be an andvanced version of  the ‘Beginner’s Guide ». Every elements are more detailled with a lot of « step-by-step » sections. More than simple tutorials, the chapters are mainly written by the artists themselves, explaining their own work’s process. These books are much more « free », and open to different artistic approaches.

http://shop.3dtotal.com/digital-painting-techniques-volume-1.html

Digital Art Masters (Vol 1, 2, 3, 4 …)

The title says it all !
This is an important collection of big books. Every chapter is a new project, presented by the artist. Sometimes focusing on the techniques, sometimes talking about the weather and their own feeling during the creative time-frame. Anyway, the content stays really simple and most of the time really interesting to read and observe !
It’s not only some beautiful books, this collection is full of good tips and reflections about the digital-art process.

http://shop.3dtotal.com/books/digital-art-masters/digital-art-masters-volume-4.html

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I hope this will help you if you are searching for some nice books to complete your personal library, or even try to make a little bit of digital painting

Cheers,

B.