My new book! "Digital Art: a complete guide to making your own computer artworks" by David Cousens

Digital Art Cover

Arcturus Publishing asked me to create a book all about digital artwork, that could be useful to beginners, intermediate and skilled professional alike.

The Digital Art book that I've written covers everything from the basics; like explaining File formats, colour selection and choosing which Digital Art program is right for you, then it explains the creative tools that you will use in digital art programs, and follows by looking at crucial design concepts like composition, leading the eye and establishing mood with colour.

It finishes with a chapter of tutorials that will talk you through things like how to successfully retouch a photo, how to achieve a number of traditional effects digitally, how to master glow effects, generate line art from photographs and creating retro pixel art.

Daddy's Things

Space Pirate Cap'n

Adventures in Pixel land 

The book also features how to use the awesome Watercolour Assistant in Photoshop CS6 (devised by Tim Shelbourne and Russell Brown) and photography by Tigz Rice and Marcus J Ranum and features some of the artwork that I provided for Digital Arts Magazine and character art from the upcoming Deseble Rising series by Mark Saint!

128 pages, full colour artwork.
You can buy the book now from Amazon:

You can Follow David:

Twitter - http://twitter.com/DavidCousens
Tumblr- http://CoolSurface.tumblr.com/
Behance - http://www.behance.net/coolsurface

Guess Who’s coming to Dinner? A PSD Tuts+ tutorial

We were pleased to hear the team at PSD Tuts+ really liked our last tutorial “The Monstrum Dichrous” and they asked us to make another one. We were asked to make the subject of our image an alien, but that was our only restriction, we we’re allowed to go any way we wanted with it. 

I wanted to avoid any of the standard cliché’s (a space station corridor, space marines/explorers about to be ambushed, you get the idea). So I started to browse the web for something random to inspire me; when looking to avoid cliché’s it helps to completely avoid the subject you’re thinking about. 

I always keep an eye on the photography of the excellent Marcus Ranum (http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/), as it turns out Marcus had recently posted a photo of a model dressed in camouflage sitting in an American diner and inspiration hit me! Why not draw a story about an alien that isn’t hell bent on destruction, abducting people or mutilating cattle, who instead is an incognito visitor that isn’t interested in humans at all, just our tasty pancakes! It’s obviously been a while since his last visit to Earth as he’s wearing old fashioned clothes to try to blend in.

You can see the tutorial over at PDSTuts+ now.
 

Have fun,
David
Twitter.com/DavidCousens

More Mosh

Unless we're on a deadline day, I normally try to make a warm-up image before work starts. I'll vary what I'm getting from the warm up; sometimes it will be some quick pose sketches, sometimes concepts and occasionally it will be a ref study. Here I've once again been inspired by a photo from a good friend of Cool Surface; Marcus Ranum and the amazingly versatile Mosh.

Unlike our previous work for Digital Arts that featured Mosh, I wasn't going for an exact likeness, this was more just for the fun of painting.

A shout out also goes to Caleb Kimbrough who runs the excellent Lost and Taken a great royalty free texture resource for supplying the wallpaper for the background. Thanks Caleb!

Have fun,
David