Editorial
Hello and welcome to 2011! I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year. I hope 2011 is a successful and creative year for all of you. I look forward to seeing all of your images throughout this year. If you haven’t submitted work for the 2dartist galleries before please do so by emailing your images to me at [email protected]. You never know, this could be your lucky year.

Ok, so on to the good stuff. You thought the season for being treated was over, but you were mistaken, we have a huge amount in store for you this month so let’s start with the tutorials. There are some things that just can’t be ignored and cheated when creating great art work, and we call these the art fundamentals. This month see’s the birth of our new series which covers the vital subjects that when mastered can turn you into a great artist. Our new series Art Fundamentals will be handled by seasoned pro’s starting with Ioan Dumitrescu who will be teaching us about composition in this issue.

There isn’t just one new series starting this month though as Darren Yeow will be kicking off our new set of tutorials about painting real looking fantasy creatures. In our new series named Photo Real Fantasy the artists will be trying to show how to design and paint fantasy creatures to look real using any method they choose. This month Darren will be showing us how to paint a Griffin.

Portrait pro Nykolai Aleksander will be continuing our portraiture series showing us how to paint a portrait of a female. If anyone knows about painting portraits it’s Nykolai and she doesn’t disappoint in this tutorial. Also continuing this month is our fantastic Painting Creatures form Folklore series, and again we call upon a master in the subject as Simon Dominic Brewer fantasy king shows us how to design and paint a Troll. I was lucky enough to spend the day with Nykolai and Simon recently as they helped out with judging for Digital Art Masters, and I can tell you these are super talented!

Every now and again it is nice to see some light hearted cartoon digital art, and we have that for you in our Making Of this month. Rafael Nascimento shows us how he painted his outstanding image Closet Monster.

This month’s Sketchbook is a more classical affair. Marta Nael shares her sketches with us and tells us how important it is to have knowledge of anatomy and form. Marta also shows us some of her fantastic digital work and shows how she combines the classical impressionist style with modern digital tools.

Nicolas Ferrand is the subject of this month’s interview. Nicolas uses some really interesting methods to create his images, including some heavy usage of 3D. Nicolas has a style that stands out and I know that you will love browsing the images he has sent us to accompany his text.

Finally there is the gallery which as always gives us a glimpse into the abundance of skill out there today, and in this issue we have work from Alex Popescu, Branko Bistrovic, Steve Jung, Andreas Rocha and many more.