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

Hello there. I am a 3D artist and a wannabe indie game designer. A year or two back I had no clue how to start on making art and or what to use. I didn't know what NURBs meant, I didn't know about rigging, texturing, animation, rendering, anything like that. Well, this book isn't going to tell you how to do that but it certainly helped me start out. This book contains breath-taking art from a massive amount of programs and tells you a short walkthrough on how they made it. This is a great book for beginners to get started on, learn some technical terms, know the names of these programs so they can do a little research on them, and get inspiration. This book is amazing! Even if you are an artist you should get this book. It's great!

How this book slipped under my nose for so long is amazing. I just recently found it and the book contains some amazing artwork. True, a lot of the book is just gallery work and the "step-by-step" section is more of a step-by-step overview of how certain effects were created. If someone is looking for a how-to book, this isn't the one. The interesting part is that the book fails to focus on any singular 3D app. One masterpiece may be done with poser, another with Lightwave, another with 3D max, another done strictly with photoshop, and yet another may use multiple application.It truly opens your eyes on the quality available with soem of the apps. This book belongs on your shelf alongside the other non-app specific titles like Digital Lighting and Rendering and Digital Texturing and Painting.

Despite the other reviews, I found this book a worthwhile buy as a beginning digital artist. It does not provide an in depth explanation of every program in it, however, it shows a wide variety of artwork from various fantasy artists and gives basic tutorial steps and multiple tips. The work can be found online with some of the tutorials admittedly, but I found it very handy to have good examples and techniques for work sitting in front of me rather than clicking back and forth between multiple online tutorials and whatever program I was working on. I am not familiar with 3d programs yet but this book gives examples of many different programs and gave me an idea of what programs I might like to try later. The tutorials were comprehensible and easy to follow as well as showcasing a variety of styles. They were not just sketch-detail sketch-end product the way that I've found many other tutoral books to be. Instead it shows the layering and painting process with each of the pieces, which is exactly what I was looking for. If you want nitty-gritty details, I suggest buying the "bible" for whatever program you want to find out more about. There's only so much you can do in a 160 page book, especially if you want an index and title page and whatnot ^.~