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(23 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Scott Ligon Page
ISBN : 0823095363
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Format: PDF
Direct download links available Digital Art Revolution: Creating Fine Art with Photoshop Paperback Free Download from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
About the Author
Frequent lecturer, digital artist, and director Scott Ligon is the coordinator for the digital foundation curriculum at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His film
Escape Velocity won “Best Experimental Film” at the USA Film Festival in Dallas, Texas. This is his first book.
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- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Watson-Guptill (March 9, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0823095363
- ISBN-13: 978-0823095360
- Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 8.4 x 10.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Digital Art Revolution: Creating Fine Art with Photoshop Free Download
Okay, so here's the deal: I have absolutely no artistic talent. Seriously, none. I can't even put a stick figure on paper with straight lines. However, all that might change. This new book, "Digital Art Revolution," has inspired me to start dabbling in the fascinating field of digital art.
What is digital art? From what I can gather, the author views it as another tool to artistic expressiveness, like a paint brush or a canvas. Digital art is not just about making web designs (although it certainly is that, to some extent.) Rather, digital art is anything you want it to be. It is a medium that is only limited by what you can imagine.
This book gets you on the path to thinking, acting and being a digital artist, a place where a simple scanned picture can turn into an artistic masterpiece. Like any new art medium, critics will probably call digital art low-brow, mindless nonsense. This book frees us from such snobbery and invites us to embark on an artistic journey that is only limited by our imagination.
If you have ever seen any of the author's digital art pieces, you'd quickly see the potential for digital art as a legitimate medium for the finest of fine arts. Digital art allows for a wonderful form of expressiveness that traditional mediums simply cannot touch. For instance, with digital art, you can take an ordinary photograph of a celebrity and turn it into a wild fantasy world with digitally-added nude fairies and a blazing inferno background. Or you can take a picture of fruit and flowers and digitally alter it to create a seascape that serves as a microcosm for the Universe. Or you can turn a photo of an old shoe into a branded logo for your firm. Or whatever you want.
This is an excellent primer on creating digital fine art, but it has some shortcomings. On a purely personal level, I found the author's preening irritating. By the same token, he is describing, in many instances, his own artwork or his own teaching style. Minor issue and while it was irritating enough to warrant mention, it does not detract from the usefulness of the book.
What does detract is the superficiality of the instruction. Apparently Ligon intends or hopes his book will be used as school text. By my count, Ligon attempts to discuss 71 separate topics, most involving the use of Photoshop, in 247 pages, about two-thirds or so of which are primarily text. That's not a lot of space and it does not permit extensive discussion of any single topic. As a result, an 11 page section ostensibly on masking very briefly covers only a few masking techniques and tries to include five other subjects as well, including sharpening. Very large books have been devoted to the subject of sharpening. In short, Ligon is providing a whirlwind tour of Photoshop. This may work for a paint-by-numbers environment, but for the student who is engaged in solo learning, it may be troublesome.
Another critical skill given short shrift is the pen tool. Ligon devotes a bit more than two text shy pages to this topic. The pen tool is essential any serious Photoshop user and is notoriously difficult to master for many, perhaps most, Photoshop users. It is crucial to compositing and nearly all of Ligon's examples involve selection and compositing to one extent or another.
Finally, Ligon shows dozens of samples of digital art without a word of guidance as to how they were created. Readers, I think, would be better served had Ligon focused on providing more detailed "how-to" instructions.