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

"The Monstrum Dichrous - a Photoshop CS5 tutorial for PSDTuts+" PLUS an interview for "Gamers Dig Art" and Get "Bitten" for Charity!

Prepare yourself for a big blog post.  For those of you with short attention spans, I've put the key points in bold writing for you.  I'm awesome, I know.

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We were happy to be asked by the people running PSDTuts+ to write a tutorial that specifically covered Photoshop CS5's Mixer brush to create a fantasy painting.  

Here we have "The Monstrum Dichrous" (loosely translated from Latin as "the Omen of 2 distinct colours") which is a bit of a spiritual successor to "Lovebirds".  It seems we have a running theme of 2 spirits (one red and one blue) that take form of various animals that are mysteriously always present at times of destruction.  The question is why are they always there?  Are they merely observers or are they somehow responsible for the chaos around them...

To see how we made this image, go and see the tutorial on PSDTuts+ now!

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When you're done with that you should go and visit Gamers Dig Art where I was interviewed by the excellent Ramel Hill. The interview is loads of fun and covers all manner of things including "How I'm going to survive to upcoming Zombie Apocalypse!".  Read the Gamers Dig Art interview here

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Now for something much more selfless, good friend of Cool Surface Tigz Rice (who we're making a book with btw) has an excellent new book out called "Bitten" which you can win by simply donating just £1 to Cancer Research UK.  Here's more from Tigzy's site:

"Following the success of 'Wonderland' in 2009, this August sees the release of 'Bitten', a new picture book for adults from London based illustrator and photographer Tigz Rice. Adapted from the well-known classic 'Snow White', the book follows the story of a mistress so desperate to keep her beauty she will do anything to save them, including harming her own family. But is she really the one to blame?
The book features an all star cast including cabaret star Joe Black, model and The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts' student Emily Marshall, Burlesque performer Lily Belle as well as alternative models Kristina Frenchum and Sally Parkinson. 
Printed by Ripe Digital, the book retails at £18 - however to say a massive thank you to Cancer Research Orpington for helping provide costumes for the book, Tigz will be holding a charity raffle to win a copy of Bitten, with the proceeds being donated to Cancer Research UK. 
How to enter? Simply follow the link in the bar above to donate £1 to Cancer Research UK. You can enter as many times as you like to improve your chances of winning. One lucky donator will be named on August 14th 2010."

Right I'm off to donate now,
Have fun,
David
http://twitter.com/DavidCousens