When I first wrote about Matt Gaser back in 2007, I remember being impressed, but when I recently revisited his site I was knocked out.

Gaser is a concept artist and art director for the film industry, though his previous work includes art for gaming companies. He has worked for companies like Electronic Arts and Sega Studios, and is now with Lucasfilm Animation.

His credits include projects like Demonstone: Forgotten Realms, Eragon, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and a new project called Blue Mars.

Since my previous article, Gaser has completely redone and expanded his web site, and has been maintaining a blog.

Gaser works digitally, painting his images in Photoshop, but the term I keep wanting to apply to his approach is “painterly”; though not in the sense of working in a manner that emulates traditional brush strokes, (as is possible in digital painting); Gaser paints in a way that is fundamentally digital, with strokes of color (often translucent) that are quite unlike traditional brushstrokes in many ways. I use the word “painterly” in the sense that the strokes of color are visible components of the painting. They impart texture and surface variation that contribute to the character of the image in a way analogous to paint strokes on canvas.

Gaser’s loose, but highly accurate application of color, and his wonderfully developed sense of color and value relationships, give his concept paintings, which are basically meant as a guide for filmmakers and game designers in composing the final animated images, a degree of visual interest that makes them stand on their own.

He has a nice balance of quickly noted passages, often in the form of atmospheric backgrounds, with just the right touches of detail, harder edges and sharp contrasts. It gives his images a feeling of dimensionality and compositional strength that I find particularly appealing.

In addition to selections of professional work, his is new web site includes sections of personal work, plein air painting, sketches, doodles and sculpture. Be sure to note that most of the galleries have multiple pages, accessed by numbered links at bottom right.

The Projects section promises that work from his most recent projects, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Blue Mars will be added soon. I’m looking forward to that, but in the meantime, you can find some work from the Blue Mars project (image above, middle) on his blog.

Also on the blog, you will find mention of another recent project, an as yet unpublished book called In the Between, illustrated by Gaser and written by his mother, Sandy Gaser.

Regular readers will know that I rarely feature my own projects or work on Lines and Colors, but once in a while I’ll be indulgent (as on my birthday, which happens to be today), particularly if I have a project going that is of interest.

I tend to be involved in many things — web site design, web comics, Flash animation, cartooning, sketching and painting, among others.

I also have a long running fascination with dinosaurs and paleontological art. Recently, I had the opportunity to combine several of those skill sets and interests; and, along with a two friends of mine, programmer Leon Stankowski and artist/sound designer Bruce Gulick, created an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you ever wanted to put a tyrannosaurus head on a pachycephalosaurus body and add a stegosaurus tail — there’s an app for that!   It’s called DinoMixer.

DinoMixer is an amusement, in which kids and dinosaur art fans of all ages can mix and match dinosaur heads, bodies and tails to make crazy mixed-up dinosaurs, or un-mix them to match up the real dinosaurs.

I designed the app and did the illustration for it, which proved to be an interesting process.

Any form of illustration has its intended method of final display, from paperback book cover to CD jewel-box to computer monitor to console game screen. The iPhone is its own display paradigm.

If you haven’t seen one in person, the screen is very nice, it’s 480×320 pixels displayed in a relatively small area, so the the actual pixels-per-inch resolution is sharper than most computer displays (160ppi vs 103ppi or less for monitors) and the color is excellent; so even though the screen is small, the image is detailed and sharp. It’s a nice platform to do art for.

I had to do a little digging to find out the preferred image format. Though the iPhone will display a variety of image files, PNG is the native image file-type for the device. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an underrated and terrific image format that allows both a wide color gamut of millions of colors and a full channel of alpha transparency.

Beyond those basics, though, I had given myself a challenge simply in the design of my particular app. To make the dinosaur parts match up, I had to divide the screen proportions into a grid, one that would accommodate the disparate body sizes and shapes of the various animals, and allow them to meet up at critical junctures where the illusion of joining them together could be accomplished. In addition, I wanted the dinosaurs to be relatively large on the screen, and use the small area to best advantage.

Fortunately, I’ve had this idea in one form or another percolating in my brain pan for several years (originally intended as a web feature, in dHTML or Flash), so the grid was a matter of adaptation to the iPhone screen proportions and refinement. But it was still quite a challenge to draw the animals so that they fit the grid, matched against one another and still retained a degree of scientific accuracy (there is no one quicker to notice discrepancies than a 10-year old dinosaur fan).

Once the dinosaurs were penciled to fit within the grid, I inked them, and in saying “penciled” or “inked”, I’m speaking of the digital equivalents, using a Wacom tablet and Corel Painter. I then applied digitally painted color and texture using Painter and Photoshop, in much the same method as I have used for the 15 years I’ve been doing my Argon Zark! digital web comic.

The use of ink lines filled with color wasn’t just a choice from my comfort with the technique, but vital, I realized, to producing the sense of unity necessary to make the dinosaur “mixes” work — the outlines connect precisely at their juncture points and form a whole.

I also took pains to blend the colors to an extent. While I wanted the colors of the dinosaurs to vary, to provide eye-pleasing variety, I also wanted some relationship between them. Though it’s difficult to see in the reduced resolution images, I found that working multiple colors into each dominant color, a technique often used by painters to produce overall harmony, was useful in giving the different colored dinos a bit of additional visual “glue”. Each of the dominant colors had accents and highlights of several of the other dominant colors within them.

In addition, I had to design a background that would showcase the animals and also connect them to the ground with a shadow, one that would meet the feet of all of the different shaped dinosaurs and serve as a universal shadow for all of them.

Lastly, I was not just creating illustrations that mixed and matched with one another, I was creating an application, and interface, with room for branding and functional controls, and the images had to work within that.

The final images, in particular the dinosaur heads, bodies and tails, had to be saved out as set-sized PNG files with transparent backgrounds, that would line up precisely with one another and allow the background to be seen behind them.

I created the original art at a much higher resolution than the target screen (3000 x 2000 pixels), both to give myself lots of leeway in creating detailed art, and to allow for repurposing the images (perhaps for T-shirts or other uses). I do the same with my web comic, create the original art at many times its intended display size.

10 dinosaurs (divided into 30 parts), a background, splash screen, nav bar and application icon later, I’m happy to say the resulting app works well, and has been getting good reviews. The seemingly simple premise took a lot of work (I conservatively estimate 200+ hours just on my part), but part of that was uptake on learning how to design and publish an iPhone app.

You can see the DinoMixer web site here, which includes screen shots as well as a short video, and those who use iTunes can see the DinoMixer app page in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes).

I just submitted a new upgrade version of DinoMixer (v1.1) to the App Store yesterday, with features that include an additional dinosaur, multiple backgrounds and a dinosaur name box that pops up when you match a dinosaur correctly. If all goes well, it should make its way through the App Store approval process and be released in about a week.

Like many iPhone and iPod Touch apps, DinoMixer will be contine be upgraded with free revisions that add features and functionality. In my case, I’ll be drawing and adding new dinosaurs and backgrounds (as well as other features) for weeks to come. I can also update or revise the existing art whenever I want to invest the time and effort. It’s an illustration project with no set end or limit, something that makes it particularly appealing.

Jorge Colombo is a Portuguese artist living in the U.S. who has been getting much attention lately for this week’s cover of The New Yorker, which he “fingerpainted” on his iPhone using a painting application called “Brushes“.

The app lets you record the painting process and play it back, and the New Yorker article linked above includes a time laps video of his process.

I say “fingerpainted” because unlike other small mobile computing platforms, the iPhone and iPod touch is a touch-screen interface, meant to be used without a stylus, so your finger becomes the “brush”. This seems a little ungainly compared to stylus based small screen painting applicaitons, but the results indicate that you can do some interesting work with it.

Colombo did his sketch in about an hour while standing outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

On Colombo’s web site you will find some of his iPhone sketches, along with other done in pencil and colored digitally. He is also offering prints of some of the iPhone work.

In addition, there is a section of video and press coverage of his New Yorker iPhone sketch cover.

[Suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris]

In what is probably a nod to their dominant demographic, Smashing Apps, a blog/webzine devoted to online resources for designers and web developers, named the article collecting these Photoshop tutorials “17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls“.

That being said, it’s still a collection of useful Photoshop digital painting techniques of potential interest to many concept artists, illustrators and comics artists, with a variety of styles and approaches, from anime and traditional comics to more realistic and fully rendered images.

Most are brief, but they cover various stages of sketching and rendering, discuss brushes, layer compositing, brush modes and other aspects of digital rendering.

(Image above, left to right:
David Munoz Velazquez, John Kearney, Melanie Delon (see my post about Melanie Delon)
Jim Zubkavich, Marta Dahlig, Shilin Huang
Artgerm, Artgerm, Yu Cheng Hong)

Noupe has aggregated a list of 60 Photoshop Tutorials from various sources. The list includes links to other lists of tutorials, so it’s actually a few hundred links and tutorials.

Some of them are directed specifically at creating digital art in Photoshop, like these 100 that I mentioned in a previous post (more here), and some of the ones here.

Others are more general, with effects, textures, patterns, downloadable brushes and PSD files, cheat sheets, keyboard shortcuts, actions and generally enough Photoshop links and resources to keep you knee deep in colorful pixels for several months.

Have fun, and don’t forget to come back up for air.

[Via Digg]

Antonio Caparo is a Cuban born illustrator currently living and working in Toronto, Canada.

Caparo studied graphic design at the High Institute of Design in Havana and devoted much of his early career to design, but gradually sifted his focus to illustration.

He has a muscular, energetic style that uses texture and tonal contrast to make his images pop off the page. They are at once realistically dimensional and freely stylized, sometimes in a cartoon-like direction. The result is a visual charm that immediately draws you in, and invites you to linger over the image.

He often opts for a muted palette and dark base tones, allowing him to give theatrical emphasis to key elements with passages of more intense color and lighter values.

Caparo’s images are often accented not only with textural variety, but with visual extras, incidental characters and little details.

I’ve found little information about his overall technique, but I know that some of his images are digitally painted, if only from their presence in his gallery on CGSociety.

There is also a Antonio Javier Caparo gallery on the new Tor Books site that I mentioned in a recent post, and a more extensive one on Shannon Associates, along with a brief bio.

Caparo has also done some comics work, notably for the American version of Heavy Metal magazine, and apparently still keeps his hand in as a graphic designer.

Outside of the online galleries mentioned above, Caparo doesn’t appear to have dedicated web site, but he started a blog just last month.

His latest book illustration project is The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas, for which he created characters, places, animals, decorations, a typeface and maps for both the book and an interactive minisite devoted to the book on the Harper Collins site.

I wrote back in February about a listing of 100 Photoshop Tutorials, many of which applied to digital painting.

Here are some more Photoshop tutorial resources I’ve come across. Though fewer of them are directly related to digital painting, they may be of interest to digital artists as well as those involved in design and photo manipulation.

The first is a listing of 50 Lighting Effects Photoshop Tutorials on The Photoshop Roadmap, in which various techniques and effects using blending modes, masking, compositing and filters are are outlined for lighting enhancement and special effects (first two images at left).

The next is Top 10 Photoshop Tutorial Websites, on Outlaw Design Blog, which is a list of lists; or more accurately a list of sites on which you will find extensive resources for Photoshop tutorials in many aspects of digital image creation and modification.

Another individual link is specific to digital painting. Though it is titled Learn How to Paint Digitally Albert Einstein, it isn’t actually a tutorial (it goes by too fast for that), but a potentially instructive time-lapse video of the progress of a digital painting of the famous theoretical physicist (left, bottom two images). Starting cleverly with cartoon-like sketch based on his famous formula for the relation of mass to energy, it progresses through various stages to a finished likeness. The little flashes are control panels being brought up and used, most likely to change blending modes on a layer. Unfortunately, they go by too quickly to be instructive, so you may have to fill in the blanks yourself (or see if you can stop the video on those frames). The video is posted on the 5min Life Videopedia.

Just for fun, throw in Worth 1000, which I wrote about in 2006, in which the venerable image editor is put to good use in the service of abject silliness. Though not tutorials, the image manipulation “Challenges” are a humorous tour through some of the compositing and touch up techniques possible in Photoshop. In my post at the time I complained about their terrible interface. They have since cleaned up their act with a new, much clearer and easy to navigate site design. Go to “Ended Advanced Photoshop Contests”.

Even the propaganda department of the only remaining member of the “Axis of Evil” (who thinks up these things?) is trying to close the “Photoshop Gap” these days. Iran is apparently in possession of Photoshop (a weapon of mass distortion?) and not afraid to use it; as evidenced by their enhancement of a photo they released, proclaiming the apparent success of a chest-thumping missile launch, with a cloned-in extra missile.

I just love this stuff!

[Some links via Digg]

The Gnomon Workshop, which is the online extension of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, is hosting Gnomon Workshop: Live!, a live weekend workshop at the school on June 14th and 15th, 2008.

These in person workshops, meant to bring together interested participants and leading professionals in the fields of concept art, production design, matte painting and character design for the entertainment industry, are held twice a year.

They include both members of the Gnomon Workshop’s distinguished staff and guest artists, many of whom have been the subject of previous posts here on lines and colors.

The June event promises an extraordinary list of guest artists, including: Erik Tiemens, Ian McCaig, William Stout, Marc Gabbana, Gerge Hull, James Clyne, Wayne Barlowe and TyRuben Ellingson.

The page for the event includes links to the artist’s websites, but, in addition to those and the resources you will find on my previous posts (linked above), there is a page on CGTalk devoted to a list of links for some of these artists.

The event will also feature a “recruiting room”, in which supervisors and art directors from the industry will be looking at portfolios and answering the questions of aspiring concept and production artists.

(Images at left: Clyne, Gabbana, Tiemens, Hull, Stout)

Bobby Chiu is a Canadian illustrator and concept designer who also teaches digital painting, both at Seneca College School of Communication Arts and online through the web-based Schoolism.

Chiu shares the Imaginism Studios web site with illustrator Kei Acedera, and also collaborates with her on various works. The Imaginism portfolio can be viewed by work for either artist or jointly by categories like Girls, Guys, Fairies, Creatures and Cats and Dogs.

There is a section of Subway Sketches, and Chiu maintains a group blog devoted to the subject. There is also an Imaginism Studios blog, more general in topic, shared with Acedera, Stephen Silver, Jason Seiler, and Thierry LaFontaine.

The Imaginism site offers a line of books and prints. The books include the works of numerous guest artists.

You can also find Chiu on the CGSociety site, with a gallery and tutorials like his Making of Three Samurai on Horseback.

Chiu does digital painting of whimsical and bizarre animals (particularly rabbit-sort-of-things), more realistic animals like cats and dogs (though in fanciful interpretations), and and assortment of odd characters including fairies and dragons.

Chiu sometimes works in a detailed and highly rendered style, which can give the cartoon-like aspects of his subjects an extra punch, and at other times in a looser, more casual style.

How about some nice monsters and warriors for a Friday diversion?

J.P. Targete paints wonderfully textured imaginary worlds populated with snarling monsters, glowering demons, deranged warriors, power-mad wizards, seething dragons, jealous witches and all manner of fun beasties and grotesqueries.

Targete is an illustrator, concept artist and art director for the publishing and gaming industries. While attending the School of Visual Art in New York on a full scholarship, Targete began illustrating book covers for Avon Books. Since then he has expanded his publishing client list to include Ace/Berkeley, Bantam, Warner Books, Eos and Tor. He won the A.S.F.A. Chesley award (named for pioneering space artist Chesley Bonestell) in 2000 for best paperback book cover.

His work has appeared in the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art and a collection of his work, Illumina: the Art of JP Targete, was published by Paper Tiger in 2003.

In recent years Targete has been focusing on concept art for gaming companies and worked for NCSoft for a time, contributing to upcoming games like Tabula Rasa and Aion.

Targete is currently freelancing and, in addition to his other projects, is working on a graphic novel. He is also the instructor for a three part DVD from the Gnomon Workshop, Imaginative Illustration with J.P. Targete.

Targete works in a variety of media, oil, watercolor, acrylic and digital. His online gallery is divided into traditional paintings, digital paintings, two sections or concept art and a section of sketches.