I recently won the book, Masters Collection: Volume 1, Digital Painting Techniques published by Focal Press at the Digital Media Arts Group monthly raffle.  I was really thrilled that I won this book because I wanted to learn more about digital painting and using my Wacom Tablet.  Focal Press has published an entire series of books devoted to the art of digital painting.  This volume is the first in a series.

Pulling from the realm of artists from all over the world, Focal Press has collected the best of the best to cover a wide variety of topics in art and digital painting.  Focal Press, as many other publishers do, has made a good group of resources available for download for you to use when following along in the book.

The book covers eight chapters:

1.  Custom Brushes
2.  Speed Painting
3.  Matte Painting
4.  Creatures
5.  Humans
6.  Environments
7.  Sci-Fi Fantasy
8.  Complete Projects

Before reading this book I didn't know what you could do and the fun you could have with Photoshop and creating custom brushes.  From reading this chapter I found out how I could (in Theory) create brushes from ink and salt experiments, animal textures, brushes that save time, skin, and how to make brushes from scratch.

Speed painting, at least to me, is a new trend in the digital world and I enjoyed reading about the processes various artists go through to do their work.  Various examples were shown, e.g twisters, robots, alien hot air balloons.  

Matte Painting was a particularly interesting chapter.  I didn't know what Matte Painting was until reading this book.  It's the combining of photos and artwork to create a world that would be impossible or to expensive to create a real backdrop or environment.  Several examples of how to create a fantasy look from the natural history museum were quite inspiring. More examples of this type of work were really cool to learn from and be inspired.

While alot of the examples and tutorials in the book are geared towards a science fiction slant in the creatures chapter, it did cover a valuable artistic lesson in creating animal eyes that was very useful and instructive.

In further review of the book, I found that this title is a most valuable instructional tool for the aspiring artist that wants to learn or is learning to digitally paint.  While some in the artistic world have decried the art as "cheating" or not real drawing or painting, I certainly disagree.  This is a real art form.  One that I wish to learn more about from reading this book and following along with the instructions.

The Bad:  Artwork seemed to have the same "style" (soft edges, foggy view, etc.)  I would have enjoyed seeing art with some variance of style.

The Good:  Loaded with tons of inspiration and awe inspiring images, make this book one that will not be put down easily.  I could spend hours just looking at the pictures inside, never mind the instructions to make them.