Digital Fantasy Painting: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Visionary Art on Your Computer

There’s a powerful fascination in creating fantasy characters and their bewitching environs on the computer screen. Written for anyone who works—or plays—in 3D graphics, Digital Fantasy Painting supplies a treasury of tested techniques that can be applied to any illustration software package.

This extraordinary resource is packed with dozens of step-by-step exercises for designing photo-realistic 3D creatures and their strange worlds. Readers will see how to produce simple human skin and bone textures, as well as an entire host of ethereal creatures such as ghosts, spirits, robots, and cyborgs. They’ll discover how to design realistic atmospheric effects as well as capture the surreal world of nightmares, futurescapes, and planetscapes. Computer artists will also find tested techniques for modeling, surfacing, staging, and lighting as well as creating water, glass, and other true-to-life motion effects.

Digital Fantasy Painting features a dazzling showcase of the very best fantasy artwork, complete with dozens of tips, examples, and shortcuts that help put the creative process on the fast track. Plus, a special section outlines the myriad software illustration packages available on the market today.

Michael Burns is a writer and journalist who has worked on many leading graphic and digital magazines. He was editor-in-chief of Computercreative, editor of CGI magazine, and is a regular contributor to CreateOnLine, Macworld, and Computer Arts. He lives in North London, UK.