Digital Artist 2009 is a new competition that recognizes the best in digital work from concept art, illustration, architectural visualisation, animation, character design and videogame art. The submission process ends August 31 so it’s a little late to be posting this (sorry, I just found out about it today), but the really cool thing about this new competition is that they’ve hosted a number of digital art master classes with the likes of Dave Gibbons and Adi Granov as instructors. Best of all, they’ve put excerpts of those classes online to share the knowledge (thank you Intel!).
In this first clip, Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame demonstrates his digital workflow using Manga Studio, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator along with a Wacom Cintiq (looks like a 21UX to me). I can’t think of a better evangelist of digital art than Dave Gibbons. His excitement is infectious.
In this second clip, Adi Granov of Iron Man fame walks us through his process. I love the fact that he still uses a light table, pencil, and water color to do much of his rendering before scanning a piece back into photoshop to finish it off. I’d really love for Adi to someday release a full DVD of his various techniques.
According to the site, Digital Artist 2009 will be hosting more master classes in the future. I hope they continue to put these clips online and I hope the competition returns next year. I can see this becoming a huge resource for all artists, digital and traditional.
View in a reader.
August 14th, 2009 - 10:24 am
When Dave flattened the image, how did he use the fill tool without it going over the black? Did he skip a step somewhere? Could you fill me in on this trick?
August 14th, 2009 - 10:27 am
I was wondering about that as well. I’ll have to do a little research into it but I seem to recall seeing something similar a while back on Gutter Zombie.
August 16th, 2009 - 7:15 am
They did skip some steps. If you look closely later, he has the ink set up as a alpha channel, rather than a layer. I’ve never really understood the advantages of that over just a regular layer.
August 16th, 2009 - 5:40 pm
It has something to do with the printing process. I’ve seen some tutorial around that explains why they do this. I’ll have to dig it up and link to it when I find it.