BackCover

Back Cover

This brilliantly illustrated book blends two unique subjects: character design and painting. It details how to put thoughts and ideas together to create characters that elicit specific emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, etc.), and it teaches how to beautifully render these characters by applying traditional painting skills with digital tools. This edition has been completely updated to use Photoshop CS as the primary tool, and includes many new characters and tutorials.

Written for artists interested in learning how to use Photoshop CS as a real painting tool, the book is divided into three primary sections. The first section deals with character design and provides strategies for developing worthwhile ideas. In the next section, you'll find fundamentals artistic principles that are often overlooked in the digital world, and learn how to incorporate them into your efforts. And in the final section, you'll work through practical tutorials that teach insightful techniques and tips for solving common visual problems that emerge when painting. The tutorials start off simple covering the basics of value, edges, color , and light. From there they evolve into in-depth techniques for blending, eyes, faces, cloth, hair, Photoshop brushes, and portraits.

Whether you are a seasoned professional or aspiring artist, you'll find a plethora of useful ideas and techniques that will improve your skills and help you create and paint masterful digital art!

About the Author

Don Seegmiller has been an artist as long as he can remember. Some of his earliest memories are of getting into trouble in school because he was drawing pictures in the margins on the math pages instead of doing the addition and subtraction.

In 1973, he was accepted into the Art Department at Brigham Young University on a talent scholarship. As with most artists, academics were of secondary importance to the drawn image, yet in the spring of 1979 he did graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design, with a specialization in Illustration. He was promptly employed by one of the departments at the school as a graphic designer/illustrator. While employed at Brigham Young University, he decided that commercial deadlines were not what he wanted to be dealing with, so he became a fine artist. He began to paint egg tempera paintings in the evenings, and after trying various subject matter decided that his heart and talent were most at home with the human figure. In the fall of 1980, with three paintings under his arm, he traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, seeking representation in one of the many art galleries in town. His work has been shown in Wadle Galleries of Santa Fe since 1981. He has painted more than 500 oil paintings of the figure and is represented in public and private collections worldwide.