Editorial
Happy New Year, and welcome to the first 2DArtist of 2010, we hope you had a good year and that you‘re looking forward to an exciting year with 2DArtist. We pick up where we left off with two of our tutorials, but also have two new ones to get our teeth stuck into.

This month’s issue sees the final installment of the custom brushes tutorial, and we bring the series to a close with Richard Tilbury. He walks us through the valuable skill of creating custom brushes for Photoshop, and in this edition we focus on the tricky task of creating a crowd. He also shows us how we can apply these techniques to tackle similar problems.

Richard Tilbury continues his busy month with us as we continue our Painting the Undead series, and in this part we look at flesh eating Zombies! Richard takes us from the thumbnail stage right through to developing the concept. Be prepared though, you may just scare yourself!

We promised you new tutorials this year and we never fail to deliver, the first of which is Painting Monsters, and the first in the series will be dealt with by the one and only Matt Dixon. We know how hard it can be coming up with the right monster for your environment, so Matt will start us off by showing us how to find your inspiration and use it to create the perfect monster for your scene, and this month we will start by looking at the jungle.

The second of our new tutorials comes from Ignacio Bazan Lazcano and he starts our series on Painting Fantasy Medieval Scenes, in this month’s issue he is looking at a Market place. Ignacio shows us how to build our medieval scene, filling it with different characters, and he also walks us through making some useful custom brushes that will make creating your scene much easier. He has also kindly donated these as a download with this issue.

We bring you an interview with the illustrator and concept artist Mike Lim also known as Daarken. Mike tells us how he was approached by Wizards of the Coast, and how different doing freelance work is to working for the gaming industry.

This month’s sketchbook comes from Alex Andreyev and we get the rare chance to see into his imagination, as he tells us how he is inspired by his dreams.

As if that wasn’t enough already we also have a making of from Andreas Rocha and a gallery that brings us images from Robh Ruppel, Branko Bistrovic, Kirsi Salonen, Yang Xueguo and many more.

Enjoy! Ed.