Editorial
Welcome to the April issue of 2DArtist magazine! You might have thought we would have prepared an issue full of Easter bunnies, little chicks and all the other cheesy things that come out this time of year. I’m sure you are pleased to hear that we have, in fact, resisted this urge and instead given you your monthly fix of droids, mythological creatures and manga characters!

On the subject of manga characters we will get the ball rolling this month by mentioning our cool new series about painting historical characters in this iconic style. We will be in the more than capable hands of Thailand-based artist Patipat Asavasena throughout this series, who will be showing us exactly what it is that makes a character look manga in style, and how to use these features and unique characteristics to create our own cool illustrations. As you will be able to tell from the cover image, the quality of the art from this series is really great, and if you like this image you will love the rest of the series.

I hope you all enjoyed watching Jama Jurabaev’s amazing Dreamscape video last month. In this issue he continues to explain he developed his storyboard and concepts to create high quality matte paintings to use as the backdrop for his imaginary planet. This series is new ground for our magazine and is proving to be really interesting. Stay tuned for next month’s issue where Jama will be showing us how he filmed the live footage that he composited into his amazing images.

Here at 2DArtist we pride ourselves on our ability to bring your great tutorials month after month, but every now and then I read a tutorial that’s a must-read for anyone interested in working in the concept art industry. That is the case with this month’s droids tutorial by Jeremy Love. Jeremy talks us through creating a droid concept for a game from the very first phase of creating and refining thumbnail sketches, through to developing your chosen design and creating technical drawings for a 3D artist. He leaves no stone unturned and gives us priceless advice every step of the way, including information about the amount of time it should take to develop a project like this. I think you are going to love this one.

This month’s mythological creature is the creepy mamalarang. The mamalarang is a witch who uses bugs to torture and cast spells on her unsuspecting prey, and in this issue Simon Dominic Brewer and Andrei Pervukhin show us how they interpreted this brief to create their own gruesome paintings.

I know that you are going to love all of the amazing tutorials in this excellent issue. The influx of inspiration doesn’t end there though; there is also a stunning gallery featuring work from Xavier Etchepare, Bruno Hamzagic, Ivan Kashubo and many more talented artists, an interview with the jaw-dropping digital artist Herve Groussin, and a sketchbook featuring the work of Herman Ng.