The Barnes & Noble Review
Collage and painting offer endless, glorious possibilities for the digital artist. In this book, Susan Ruddick Bloom will help you find your inspiration and make it real using today's remarkable tools, Photoshop and Painter.
Bloom combines an extraordinary traditional artist's background with 20 years' digital experience (dating back to the first 128K B&W Macs). In this book, she hosts 21 of today's most remarkable digital artists. Each walks you through their favorite digital projects -- covering sources for ideas, Photoshop and Painter techniques, work processes, even physical materials.
Collectively, with Bloom's unifying hand, they offer a wonderfully coherent course in creating digital fine art. You'll start with planning and inspiration: finding your concept, understanding what will unify your collage or painting, considering scale and lighting. Next, you'll turn to the "step-by-steps" of digital painting: using filters, brushes, and cloning; and assembling collages in both Photoshop and Painter. The imagery and projects are wonderfully diverse, from still lives to bullfights, portraits to panoramas.
Bloom takes a closer look at some favorite filters, including Find Edges, Photo Filters, Motion Blur, and even some third-party plug-ins. Then, in a wonderful, if brief, chapter on experimentation, Bloom shows how to combine traditional media with digital. (For example, capturing traditional woodcut, intaglio, and silk-screening techniques, and using Lazertran to place your image onto marble, glass, tile, fabric, or even silk.)
The book concludes with five open-ended exercises designed to help you practice your new skills: from building collages based on grids, to painting with the Art History brush and Emboss filter. You needn't use Bloom's sample digital files, but they're downloadable if you want them. Bill Camarda, from the September 2006 Read Only
