It’s time to learn some photo editing for your next assignment. You will need to provide a photo of your own (either digital or a scan of a real one) and fix it using the techniques we cover this week.…

Spring semester has started and I am teaching once again. In addition to teaching Flash and related courses at Santa Rosa Junior College, I also began teaching at Napa Valley College. This is a Digital Art class, DART 130, using…

Happy 2012! I’ve got some new stuff planned for this year. Recently, I was given a set of interview questions from the website Exhibitions without Walls, the same site that had me as one of their judges in their last…

Recently, I was asked to serve on a panel of jurors for Open, the latest photography and digital art competition at Exhibitions Without Walls. All of the work was really good and it was a bit hard to narrow things…

I recently completed an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge. The end client is a construction and infrastructure company and it will be used as the header image of their calendar for next year. The final image was 26″ long, but…

Remember the very first tutorial I posted? If not, you can see it here. Recently, I was asked to build it into a T-shirt design. I’ve done this sort of thing before, but not always with the most exciting art.…

My contact at the Directory of Illustration has a blog about her work and other commercial art topics. She put up a post about my large exhibit image I did a couple of months ago. It’s always nice to have…

We all had a good time at my presentation last month on Hallowe’en. Hopefully, that didn’t keep too many people away. Luckily for those who could not be there, my entire presentation was recorded and is up now for all…

It’s been in the works for a while, but now I know I’m giving the presentation at the North Bay Adobe Users Group meeting this month. The topic I have chosen is Vectors and Effects: from Photoshop to Illustrator and…

There are many ways to remove the green spill, so let’s start simple and work our way up. A good technique is to see what an adjustment layer will do. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer above the photo. Clip it…

With a few quick steps, we can fix the mask. The information is there; we just need to pull it out. Layer masks are simply greyscale images that can be adjusted like any color photo with Levels or Curves. To…

This tutorial is a departure from illustration, but it’s a topic we have been covering in some of my classes lately. Background removal is an important skill in Photoshop, something every digital artist should know how to do. I have…

To make the image a bit more exciting and tell more of a story, we need something to happen. It’s all set to fire some kind of beam down into the ground. Because the background is so warm with a…

Even though the ship is basically black, you don’t want to start with a color that absolute. It’s best to avoid pure black (0, 0, 0) or pure white (255, 255, 255). Using a very dark grey is a better…

The ground and mountain range were quickly sketched in using dark colors, all on the same layer. To get a hint of the sun’s glow peeking over the mountains, load a selection from this layer, make a new layer, and…

For this little painting, I decided to use standard HD size (1920×1080). As you should know, if you are dealing just in pixels, resolution doesn’t matter. I chose this size for a good width to height ratio and it’s good…

Finally, as promised, here is a new tutorial based on a digital painting I did earlier this year.…

The past few weeks have been very busy for me around here. In addition to my new fall classes, I had a large exhibit graphic to paint and prepare for printing in a very short amount of time. The tight…

You may know that most of my work is as a freelance illustrator, but I always try to supplement it with a regular paycheck by teaching. As an adjunct or part-time instructor, I never know from semester to semester what…

Good news, everyone! I had been putting it off, but at the last minute, I decided to take the Adobe Flash recertification exam. I won’t embarrass myself by giving you my score, but I did pass, so I am now…