Fairies Art Studio

Everything You Need to Create Your Own Magical Fairy World

by
David Riché

Watson-Guptill, Marsh 2010, 128 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-8230-1643-3

Genre: Non-Fiction

Subgenre: Instructional / Drawing / Computer
Reviewed: 2/13/2010

Reviewed by: Conan Tigard

Book Cover

Excerpt

Synopsis

Along comes Fairies Art Studio, a book that not only teaches you about all the different types of fairies, it also instructs you how to color them like the professionals do . . . on the computer using either Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or Paint Shop Pro. The book is filled with examples of different types fairies with the layers that have been used. Each type of fairy has a full description of what the kind of fairy they are and a list of all the different layers that are on the compact disc for this type of fairy.

Along with the book comes a compact disc that contains 80 images of fairies, accessories and backgrounds. Each image has multiple layers which can either be selected or deselected, so your fairy can have multiple looks. For instance, I have Adobe Photoshop CS3 and opened the 3_Sylph. This fairy had twenty-seven layers you could either use (view) or not use, like: 5 accessories, 4 heads, 8 outfits, 3 upper bodies, 3 lower bodies, and 4 wings. So, I took the original fairy and changed him up a bit, chose each layer that I wanted to work on, and used the paint bucket to drop color on my different layers. I didn't do anything fancy like shading, but I was happy when I was done. On the right is an example of my fairy. This took me about ten to fifteen minutes to color.

This book contains the following sections:

• Introduction
• On the Disc

• Part 1: DIGITAL FAIRY ART
  • Introduction to Digital Art
  • Photoshop and Photoshop Elements
  • Photoshop Tools
  • Photoshop Brushes
  • Creating Fairies
  • Mixing Fairy Costume Sets
  • Adding Accessories
  • Adding Characters to Backgrounds
  • Choosing Colors
  • Blocking in Base Colors
  • Using Contiguous to Speed Up Coloring
  • Shading
  • Applying Shading
  • Fine-Tuning Your Colors
• Part 2: FAIRIES
  • Sylph Fairies
  • Flower Fairies
  • Contemporary Fairies
  • Gothic Fairies
  • Puck Fairies
  • Garden Fairies
  • Woodland Folk
  • Elves, Pixies, and Gnomes
• Part 3: BACKGROUNDS
  • Background 1: Forest Glade
  • Background 2: Toadstool Hut
  • Background 3: Magical Library
  • Background 4: Tulip Patch
  • Background 5: Fantasy Castle
  • Background 6: Secret Stairway
  • Background 7: Mushroom Glade
  • Background 8: Woodland Clearing
• Part 4: ACCESSORIES, PLANTS, AND FLOWERS
  • Accessories
  • Plants and Flowers
  • Index

Fairies Art Studio is a instructional book on how to color many types of fairies using Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements by David Riché. The book also includes a disc with 80 layers Photoshop images comprising of 248 MB.

PC Requirements

• Windows XP or later

• Photoshop 7 or later, or

• Photoshop Elements, or

• Paint Shop Pro X and later

Mac Requirements

• Mac OS X or later

• Photoshop 7 or later, or

• Photoshop Elements

Review

The Fairies Art Studio instructional book and CD is a wonderful tool for someone to use if they want to learn how to use Photoshop to color an object, like a fairy. The CD is packed with great layered images that lets the user vary the fairy they are working greatly. A user can change a fairy so much that a friend would not even be able to tell that it came from the same template. The book is packed with different examples of the same fairy to show some of the variances.

The only issue I had was that when I opened any of the images on the CD in Photoshop, the default Mode was set to Grayscale. I had to manually configure the image to be RGB so I could use colors. I would have thought that should have been set automatically since the user is supposed to be learning how to use colors on the images.

Let me say this, though . . . I had a blast coloring my fairy. I bet I would have even had more fun playing with the shadings and making my fairy really pop. Any computer art enthusiast will love the images on the CD and I highly recommend picking up a copy of Fairies Art Studio so you can learn how to make some really awesome looking fairies.

All I know is that my 14-year old daughter, who absolutely loves to draw, will take this book and CD and run with it. I bet that her room will soon be plastered with professionally-colored fairies that she created using Fairies Art Studio. I highly recommended this book and CD.