Fine Art Photoshop: Lessons in Digital Drawing and Painting [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

While most Photoshop books focus on commercial artwork, this outstanding full-color guide focuses on fine art, making it a great choice for aspiring artists. The authors explore the established principles of drawing and painting--covering, for example, perspective, line, lighting, volume, and value--as they explain the relevant paint and effects tools in Photoshop.

Nolan and LeWinter take four examples of art: a boat, a self-portrait, a still life, and an architectural drawing (of a door), and reproduce them in various ways using different painting techniques. You first go through the four examples by using basic drawing and sketching techniques in gray-scale tones; you use tools that emulate the look of pencil, charcoal, and airbrushes. Next you create colorful versions of these works, in the process learning how to manage color, create palettes of your own, and match the look of watercolor and pastels. The next section takes you further, reproducing the images in versions that utilize washes, emulate oil paintings, and have realistic textures. Then you apply more special effects, changing lighting, working with a scratch-board technique, and replicating the look of impressionistic and surreal paintings.

Finally, the authors explain the Photoshop paint tools such as Pencil, Paintbrush, Airbrush, Erase, and Rubber Stamp and show images in which these tools are put to work. They also describe printing issues, provide a glossary of art terms, and offer a guide to digital printing equipment and services. --Kathleen Caster

Create expressive artistic effects and polish your individual style with Fine Art Photoshop. Learn digital art techniques to make your work more original and intuitive - without third-party programs or filters. These simple exercise, practical examples, and step-by-step lessons help you master Photoshop and unleash your imagination and creativity. Explore the latest features of Photoshop 4, including advanced color correction, the Free Transform function, guides and grids, and more. Based on traditional art instruction techniques, Fine Art Photoshop is like having your own painting class - in one book.

A tutorial and guide that teaches readers how to harness Photoshop's power to create artistic effects. The information builds on each of the eight Photoshop tools - Eraser, Pencil, Airbrush, Paintbrush, Rubber Stamp, Smudge, Sharpen/Blur, and Dodge/Burn/Sponge - chapter by chapter.

Why we wrote this book

This book is about gaining control of Photoshop as a paintbox so you can make art with the electronic brush as naturally and predictably as with one of china bristle and wood.

Digital fine art has held my imagination for a long time now. I use Photoshop every day to make my living as a print and web designer, and I yearned to try it for making art. Finally, I decided there was no reason to be intimidated by Photoshop as a fine art tool.

I was amazed by the similarities and intrigued by the differences of doing a traditional or a digital painting, and the structure of the book came to reflect that dichotomy. It's built around lessons on still life, portrait, and landscape. You start with a sketch, and then build up layers of color to refine images. Only in digital painting, you can remove or alter brushstrokes which would have been "permanent" otherwise. This opens your art up into millions of possibilities and permutations.

We wanted to avoid digital art pitfalls like just running a filter on an image and calling the effect "art" when it was only the interesting effect of an algorithm somebody else wrote. That led me to see that nuance and complexity--which bring the touch of the artist's hand often lost in digital processes--can be achieved with repeated brush and eraser strokes, fading, layering, building up, taking away, changing colors and shapes--much like the way you create a "real" painting.

I found that I got looser creatively the more I learned about Photoshop's brushes and their settings, and when I could travel quickly through them. I hope Fine Art Photoshop loosens your creativity the same way.

Finally, when you reach the point where people want to buy your art, the book contains valuable information about where and how to output it properly for exhibition in galleries or museums, for sale and archival purposes.

Let me know what you think of our book.