Bold Visions: A Digital Painting Bible: For Fantasy and Science Fiction Artists

by Gary Tonge

Digital paintings and practical demonstrations of futuristic spacescapes, medieval landscapes, and revolutionary vehicles, accompanied by techniques and an introduction to the technical equipment required, provide an in-depth review of this increasingly popular digital medium. Original. 10,000 first printing.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Drawing, Design

128 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2008

Reviews

[Parka]

(Picture source: parkablogs.com)

Bold Visions is more of a starter guide to digital painting than a bible.

It goes through the core art techniques such as colour, lighting, composition, research, materials and stuff like that. The good thing is all these concepts are explained clearly with great illustrations as examples.

The techniques and tips are presented in a pointer style as well as in the form of several step-by-step workflow screenshots. These step-by-step processes take a look at how Gary Tonge creates his digital sci-fi illustrations, as well as explain the considerations he takes to achieve certain effects — sometimes dictated by clients. These are not tutorials that go into technical software details like changing opacity jitter and settings.

This book is recommended to beginners to digital paintings, especially fantasy and science-fiction artists.

If you're looking for step-by-step tutorials into digital painting, you might also want to check out ImagineFX's Fantasy Workshop. The tutorials there are slightly more in depth.

This review was first published on parkablogs.com. There are more pictures and videos on my blog.

[Lio]

The least helpful book i came across. I read this when i first started out with digital art and this book went no where to explain how to access any functions needed to use the program and left me feeling like i wasted money on this.
Do not recommend to beginners.

[Roxane Lapa]

GENRE:
Non-fiction Art

BASIC SYNOPSIS
The book features Gary Tonge's epic, mostly scifi artwork, with basic art lessons on things like lighting, color, etc, and in many cases, step by step screens of his process.

MY THOUGHTS
Even if there was no text, and just his art, I would have given it 5 stars because it's so inspiring to look at, but there are plenty of good lessons in there too. 1 minor gripe would be the paper it's printed on - it's far too glossy for my taste. On some pages, the glare from a window behind me shining on the page completely obscured what I was looking at. I think a matte finish would have been far better choice.

[Donyae Coles]

Seemed very basic. A good place to start but you can find a lot of the information elsewhere.

[Kevin de Ataíde]

An excellent and well-produced summary of digital painting from a master of the genre. Much recommended, with good advice and masterful illustration, mostly from the author's own work.

[Jay Javier]

Easy to follow and understand discussions on Tonge's approach to digital painting. Inspiring enough and a good showcase of his work. Tonge's strengths are exemplified by his fantastic landscapes and atmospherics but his disinterest in some areas are also evident, especially when it comes to figures/portraits. Overall a good read, useful and inspiring though.

[Elisabeth Young]

This book is really good with the basics and builds on ideas. It was very helpful to me. There are a lot of step by step examples, but when he uses an example like this he is illustrating a point, a style of painting, or a subject. I was able to take some helpful tips and some new methods that I'm trying out now.

[Katy]

What i have to say is the artwork is beautiful in this book the printing is quite simply stunning. The text and images are quite easy to follow and understand.

What i have to say is that the artist uses a dated software maybe photoshop CS2 i cannot say but the information is still relevant to more modern versions as it teaches you how to paint rather then what the software does.

[Mary Poppins]

good book for begginers!

[Curtis Teichert]

Great for beginners!