More books, holy cow

Huzzah!  More art books!  Free!  Agablagablaga /spaz

So recently a good friend of mine gave me a couple of books that will undoubtedly prove very useful as I strive to master digital painting.  The first I'll cover is Fantasy Workshop, by ImagineFX, which focuses entirely on digital painting.  Might I add that one of the artists profiled in this book is Bobby Chiu?  He's a digital artist I've known about for the past year now.  I discovered his work on Deviantart and from there sifted through his website (he owns his devart account jointly with Kei Acedara, and both of them with a number of other artists make up Imaginism Studios, which is an awesome site I highly suggest you take a look at. )

But anyway, fangasm on my part.  Or my brain just congratulating itself for remembering something. Anyway.

A cursory flip through the book showed step by step processes on how the individual artists render their characters and whatnot.  It also seems to yield a good number of tips for working with Photoshop, as well as tricks that any good artist should know about and utilize. 

The second book, Drawing and Painting Fantasy Landscapes and Cityscapes (Rob Alexander)  is another book that will prove invaluable.  It focuses entirely on rendering environments, and profiles specific ones, such as desert, caves, etc.  A very, very handy tool that I will be referring to as I begin to create fleshed-out characters. 

So yeah, today I received some awesome, useful books for free from a friend.  I think today turned out alright.  : D 

Thanks Matt!

I've been drawing. Really, I have.

It's just that most of my drawings over the past few weeks have been crappy little observational sketches.

I'll post more imaginative work eventually, I promise.  

Books and laziness

A book I ordered on Amazon finally came in today--Color and Light, by James Gurney.

  I put off buying it earlier because I wasn't sure how far I would take painting.  Now that I've gotten into digital and oil painting, I can't think of a better time.  Looks to be an interesting read.

I feel like I've been putting off other work to further my knowledge and skill of painting.  I need to learn how to budget my time...