Chris Beatrice worked his way from an illustrator for computer games to art director, creative director and then general manager for a computer gaming company. He moved on from there to found his own game company, Tilted Mill Entertainment, whose latest release is Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile.

Beatrices’ formal art training was in sculpture. He was drawn from that into 3D graphics as he established a career in computer game character design. Over time he has become more interested in 2D computer graphics and now does mostly digital painting in Painter and Photoshop.

His site contains galleries of his work, divided into Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Wallpapers. (Wallpapers are also linked from “Downloads”.) Many of the painted images are accompanied by several hi-res details of different sections of the image. His digital paintings can be richly detailed an still retain an open and painterly feel.

There is also a section devoted to Tutorials, in which Beatrice walks you through the process of creating his digital paintings step by step. Two of the tutorials are on the Chris Beatrice site and two are how-to articles on the CGSociety site.

There is also a new and extensive tutorial on the CGSociety site (that is not currently linked from his own site) for the image shown above, his interpretation of Alice receiving “Advice from a Caterpillar”.

It starts out with thumbnails and preliminary sketches for the character designs, moves into the pencil drawing, then goes through the steps of establishing tonal values in an undepainting, laying in the local colors, refining and modeling the forms and developing the final details of the finished image.

The tutorials page also includes a link for downloading the custom Painter brushes used in several of the tutorials.

Beatrice’s work appears in the digital painting collections Expose 3 and Painter from Ballistic Publishing.