Have you ever tried to make your own sketchbook? Having a personalized sketchbook can make the difference for an artist! You can use your favourite drawing paper, you can choose the cover and size of the pages. You can also create a space for the pencil or the pen. Also, this can be a really cheap solution, instead of buying premade ones. And you can show your style from the cover!

Well, I love to carry with me my sketchbook because I need to fix inspirations and to take notes when I need. And I think it is a must for an artist, if you want to learn drawing, you should start a sketchbook, where you can draw in the spare time, wherever you are.

So, in the past days, I googled for a sketchbook tutorial, and I found an interesting explanation here: [link].

I think this can be a very usedul, easy to make, and cheap thing. Also, this can be a great Christmas gift! Sure I will give it a try!

The site is owned by Dani Jones, an child books illustrator, and is full of great articles and tutorials, so try to give it a read!

The Custom Brush Guide is a Digital Painting tutorials series written by Marta Dahlig for ImagineFX Magazine.

This guide is divided in 4 Workshops:

- Skin & Hair [link]

- Fabric & Costume [link]

- Nature & Enviroment [link]

- Elements [link]

As you may see, this guide helps you to set up your own brushes (or Marta’s source brushes) in Painter or Photoshop to develop your artwork. Each article is dedicated to a different part of the artworks, so that the author can concentrate on all the aspects of that particolar subject. If you click on the links above, you will see that you can download also the source files of the articles, in this case Marta’s Brushes.

As a beginner in Digital Painting, I found these articles really useful, even because when I started working to this kind of art, I had not idea of how to set my brushes to do that particolar thing. Of course, there are many ways to paint fabric or eyelashes, but this guide can be a really good starting point for beginners, and a source of inspiration for intermediate Painters.

About the Author: Marta Dahlig is a talented and young illustrator from Poland. Art has been her passion for all her life. She’s a self-taught artist and her work fosuses mainly on Fantasy subjects. She works with Photoshop and Painter, and she’s “famous” for creating custom brushes too.

Marta Dahlig at: Deviant Art | CGSociety

ImagineFX Magazine: [link]

Exotique 4 is the fourth art book of the wonderful Exotique series published by Ballistic Publishing. This is a series of illustration books dedicated to the most amazing CG Character art. This edition features the works of 215 talented artists from 45 different countries.

In 208 pages, this book features 322 pieces of great and breath-taking artworks, and this edition includes more artists from Asia countries.

This book, like the past ones, comes in two different editions, with different prices:

- A Soft Cover edition, which features as cover an artwork from Mario Wibisono titled “Pepper Superstar“, and the character represented is Pepper, a CG girl created and copyrighted by Stanley Lau.

- A Special Limited Edition, where the cover is made of black leather with embossed lettering, and features the artwork “Butterfly” from Tang Yuehui. This edition comes with four 220×297cm bonus prints featuring the two covers and other two amazing artworks from the collection.

Indeed, Exotique 4 is an amazing art book that should be in every art appreciator home!

For more information and an online preview of the book: [link]