Editorial
Hello and welcome to the February issue of 3dartist. I hope that 2011 has been an artistic year for you so far. Also a very happy Chinese New Year to our Chinese readers, I hope you have a great year of the Rabbit.

This month’s issue is massive, it’s epic. You could maybe even say it was GIANT! Forgive my abstract link to our tutorials this month, but we continue our Photo Real fantasy series by tackling a photo real giant with Richard Tilbury. Rich talks a lot about the design and idea behind his image and by giving it a story makes it appear a lot more believable and realistic. Rich is a pro when it comes to integrating photo’s to a digital painting, and gives us master class as to how to do this and make it look real. Rich has a double bill in this month’s issue and also handles our portrait tutorial. In this issue Rich shows us how to paint a boy and his subject matter is his son Gabriel.

Another outstanding tutorial this month is by Jesse van Dijk. We have been asking seasoned industry professionals to guide us through the core subjects that any artist needs to appreciate, and this month Jesse shows us ways to portray and use light and color to accentuate the message in our image, and really drive home its entire concept. Jesse shows us how to do this by using examples from his portfolio which is fantastic. A big thanks goes to Jesse for shedding light on the matter (sorry I couldn’t resist).

This month’s issue contains the final chapter of our Creatures from Folklore series. We will be sad to see the series come to an end as the tutorials have been great, but we do wrap things off in the best way possible with another fantastic tutorial. Jason Wei Che Juan doesn’t only show us how he painted his image but gives us an insight into Chinese folklore. When he told me he wanted to paint a Huli Jing, I thought to myself “a what!” but after a brief lesson in Chinese culture and folklore I knew what he meant, and you will as well once you have read his practical and educational tutorial.

I managed to catch up with Serge Birault for this month’s issue. For those of you who are regular readers of 3dartist you will know who I mean as he is a regular in our galleries. Serge is Pin-up royalty and has blown us away for years with his realistic paintings and fantastic character portrayals. If you are impressed by Serge’s images watch this space as soon he will be doing a Pin-up series for our magazine.

I am swiftly running out of space so I will speed up and just let you know about the cool technique used by Yuehui Tang in this month’s Making Of. He uses gray scale but backwards, sound weird? Check it out to see what I mean. This month’s issue also contains a sketchbook by Dimitar Tzvetanov and gallery images by Steve Jung, Andreas Rocha, Claire Beard and many more. Anyway, don’t take my word for it, read on and check it out!