Alessia Zambonin, Annie Stegg, Lois Van Baarle
Ballistic Publishing
(cover to the tenth in Ballistic’s D’Artiste series, this time with the theme of fashion design, art by Lois Van Baarle)
We’ve been delighted to carry the Ballistic series of digital art books for some time on our webstore, and I’ve been impressed over the years with the exceptionally high quality, the books beautifully produced and always on very high quality paper to show off the colour art at its finest. The D’Artiste series has been running for quite some time now and has become something of an institution in digital art circles, not just because of the aforementioned high quality art reproduction but because, as with a number of Ballistic’s books, it isn’t just a case of sit back and enjoy the pretty pictures (although it is quite pleasurable to do just that!). The D’Artiste series is also billed as a ‘digital arts masterclass’ and that is indeed just what this range does – not only showcase artwork but talks you through the creation process, from basic figure sketching and layout to layering, rendering, colouring, backgrounds, making a character and their design approriate to the requirements, be it a computer game, painting, comic, animated work or any other medium.
(Dorothy by Jessica Oyhenart-Ball)
This tenth volume in the series concentrates on the topic of fashion design, an important and yet often overlooked area of character creation, and one that obviously offers up the artist an extra skill they can use in a variety of different jobs or commissions as well as in regular work, be it illustration for journals or ads, design for animation or comics or games or film. Alessia Zambonin, Annie Stegg and Lois Van Baarle are the main artists featured here, talking about and showing not only their work but also offering up tutorials in creation and design, covering everything required for the fashion look for your character, from the obvious – what style of clothing suits that character for that story or environment – to detailed aspects, such as how best to render it over the character’s pose, getting the proprtions and colours right, the look of the fabric (increasingly important especially in game design given how much sharper and more detailed graphics keep getting) and how it hangs on the character or moves as they do, using accessories to finish the look and enhance the feel of the character and more, all brought together in step by step, well illustrated tutorials.
(a segment from Lois Van Baarle’s tutorial on backgrounds and colouring)
This volume also takes in some examples of finished work from invited artists selected by and commented on by the Zambonin, Stegg and Van Baarle, which means there is a real diversity of digital art to take in, from Steampunk to Western to Anime/Manga inspired fantasy characters.
(one of the invited guest artist images – the Marshal by Italy’s Paolo Parente)
With each of the invited guest artist images the principal three featured artists discuss why they liked the image and what aspects of the design they thought worked particularly well and why, so there is plenty of inspiration there to draw on for your own designs. As with the rest of the popular D’Artiste series you are basically getting a beautiful art book combined with a serious tutorial; if like me you can’t draw you can enjoy the high quality reproduction of those who can as well as getting an insight into how that art is produced, but if you are an artist then there is a lot in here to help and inspire you, to make you perhaps consider some aspect of visualisation that you hadn’t paid as much attention to, all skills which are of value to any artist looking for work as well as for personal satisfaction in honing their craft.
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