A book recommendation

I am reluctant to recommend books here, mostly because I think, "endorsed by amateur pornographer's blog!" isn't necessarily the recommendation most authors would want.

But let me take off my 'catfight artist' cap for a moment and put on my 'ex-commercial artist' cap instead.

While wandering around Amazon looking for I-don't-remember-what, I found a book called "The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics". It was written by an artist named Freddie Williams, with whom I was not previously familiar. But he does his work entirely in Photoshop.

I use Corel Painter for the major part of my art, and Photoshop for 'post-production' purposes. There are things I can do in Painter that still can't be done in Photoshop.

But Photoshop has advantages: tight integration with Illustrator for adding dialog, and significantly better color management and filter tools than Painter. Plus, dozens of plugins are available for Photoshop, and none at all for the current version of Painter.

So, I've had some interest in trying to rely more on Photoshop.

Getting back to the book: I guess "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" opened the doors for this kind of product. 'HDCMY' certainly targeted a fanboy audience rather than an artist audience, but there was still useful information to be found within its pages.

But make no mistake: "The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics" is a book for artists, not fanboys. It's published by Watson-Guptill, an art book specialty publisher. It assumes you already know how to compose a scene, draw the human figure, etc., and pencil and/or ink. Its purpose is specifically to help you, as an experienced pen-and-ink artist, make the transition to creating press-ready line art and color in Photoshop.

I think some of Williams' recommendations on backup are a little outdated – with terabytes of hard drive storage available for under $200, it's no longer advisable, in my opinion, to back up huge graphic files on DVDs. Hard drives offer the best bang for the buck for storage, plus the advantage of speed and ease of recovery.

But in all other respects, every page of this book offers useful information I didn't already know.

I'm still wanting to do some art in a more comic-book style format, because my painted approach is so time-consuming. This book may help me get there.