A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Another tutorial from Digital Art.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have never ever been able to get the hang of computer graphics by reading text books. I have to see the process. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Lynda.com, but they have few tutorials specifically for comics-type graphics.

The Digital Art tutorials allow you to follow along with the pros as they create their work.

Some of them may be too advanced for beginners, but this feature is easy material for newbies. If you are just starting out, get one of those short term subscriptions to Lynda.com ($25 a month for UNLIMITEd access) and back it up with a selection of Digital Art Tutorials. You could check out any terms or techniques you didn’t quite understand on the Digital discs over at Lynda. For example, when I was starting out I could not seem to get a hang of the whole idea of layers. Many art tutorials assume knowledge of this, and I’d just sit there in a mist wondering “How the hell did they do that?” So after checking terms I did not know at Lynda.com, and then reviewing the Digital Art Tutorials, I was able to get the hang of things I had spent more than a year trying to suss out without success.

BTW, I was talking with Brian Haberlin when I was at NYCC, and he swears up and down that the new CS4 Photoshop is utterly beyond utterly. OK, “utterly beyond utterly” is my term, but he swears CS4 is worth the price of the upgrade.

For my own part, I am so happy with the ease of making layers on comic art in CS3 (up from Photoshop 7), that I can hardly believe how simple the new system is. I never quite got the hang of the old system. I can only imagine how much better CS4 must be.

I’m not going to upgrade right now because I simply don’t need to: not doing a whole lot of digital art at the moment. I’m doing a bit of painting and practice for my portfolio.

Plunking down a few bucks to get Digital Art Tutorials is worth every penny. After a few hours of watching these tutorials, I walk away with knowledge and tools that save me countless hours of scrambling around on my own. I nabbed some very nice computer painting jobs with my very first samples!

This is not a paid endorsement. I was given several samples of the tutorials, and also purchased others on my own.

I know sometimes these tutorials and classes can seem expensive, but they are not nearly as expensive as the time you sink into trying to figure out things by yourself. They really are a great investment.

c