Editorial
Welcome to the May issue of 2DArtist. We hope you all enjoyed the excellent April issue of 2DArtist and are looking forward to another great instalment of tutorials from some of the best 2D digital Artists around.

Some of the regular readers of 2Dartist will remember a great making of a few months back for an image called The Beast by Jama Jurabaev. Well this month Jama is back with not one, but two articles. Firstly Jama gives us an insight into how he sketches out his work before applying color in this month’s sketchbook. Jama shows us how he creates the base for an image by using black and the grey scale to explore shapes and lighting. Jama’s second article this month gives us an opportunity to see how he puts his methods into practice as he talks us through Painting a Futuristic City. Jama has a great way of building a scene and exploring all options to make sure he has the composition he desires. Follow his interesting techniques as he talks us through creating flying traffic around his Futuristic City.

This month, 2DArtist have had the privilege of interviewing the fantastic surreal artist Yang
Xueguo. Yang talks about the path he took to become an art teacher at a university in China, and goes into detail telling us why he chooses to paint surreal subjects rather than real life topics. Yang also shares with us a selection of his work that is unlike anything you would have probably seen before so I recommend taking a look.

This month’s Monster comes from an excellent artist that has had work featured in our online and magazine galleries in the last few months Andrei Pervukhin. Andrei shows us and shares with us his selection of brushes, and tells us how he used them to paint his excellent Sewer Dwelling swamp monster. We also get an insight into how he explores the subject with his initial sketches and then uses them in his painting to make his excellent image that has been used on the cover of this issue.

In this month’s Fantasy Medieval Scene we are taken high into the mountains to look from a distance at a Castle surrounded by a mountain city. The artist that brings the scene to life this month is Alex Broeckel. Alex shows us some great techniques for ensuring that you maintain depth in your image and how to explore your painting to get the most from it by looking at it from different angles.

For those of you that have been enjoying the tour of the steampunk world with Chee Ming Wong we have a great treat for you this month as we are taken into the engineering sector. Chee talks us through making a scene dramatic by using up lighting and how to create an underwater environment.

What a feast of inspiring content we have for you this month, and as if that wasn’t enough we also have a making of by Jone L. Leung, and some great gallery images from Kerem Beyit, Ignacio Bazan Lazcano, Neil Maccormack and many more. Enjoy!