Rob Shields is probably one the greatest and most well known digital artist I’ve ever seen. His work serves as a constant inspiration to myself and many others in the artistic community. Whenever I look at Rob Shields work I am blown away and inspired to take my own work to another level.

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing an amazing Digital Artist who specializes in Digital Painting. She is Russian based artist and designer Alena Lazareva and you may be familiar with her work from DeviantArt, Advanced Photoshop, Photoshop Createive, or ImageFX. Her images are nothing short of mystical and it was a real treat to get to talk to her about her work!

Digital Painting by New York Graphic Designer Roberto Blake. “Lady Snowflake” is a winter themed digital painting developed for Photoshop Creative’s forum Challenge “Seasons”.

The Star Girl, is a concept I’ve been revisiting in my Photo Manipulations, that I’ve become quite fond of. By combining and array of lighting effects to create the surreal image conveying energy and emotion. The concept was so well received when I did the first Star Girl image, that I decided to do a series of them.

The online community is full of amazing, talented digital artist, and today I’m happy to showcase some fantastic photo-manipulation work I’ve seen on DeviantArt.

Thanks to the OneOnSoftware.com plugin Genuine Fractals 6 I’m able to resize and recrop a lot of my work for different purposes. Everything from creating desktops, to prints! It really is an amazing plugin and well worth the investment to any graphic designer for the range of things it allows you to do with your images, all without a loss of quality. I decided to offer one of my favorite early Fantasy Photo-manipulations, Light Bringer, as a free desktop background.

Magic Melody
This image was something that came to me while watching the Brothers Grimm movie. I decided on the concept for a girl walking through the dark forest spreading enchantment with an instrument, then remembered the perfect stock image by Marcus J Ranum

Buttercup
While in Barnes & Noble I decided to pickup the book the Princess Bride on a whim last week only to find that it was going to be playing on telvision soon! This being one of my favorite movies growing up, and one of my favorite novels as a teenager, I decided to do a series of images as a tribute. “Buttercup” is the first image in the series. I found a stock photo that I felt favorite the lead heroine and decided to work some photoshop magic.

Star Girl
Star Girl was interesting to work on, I used several effects here including one the required me to make a custom flare-brush set. This has since become one of my most popular images on both Photoshop Creative and Advanced Photoshop.

Poker Face
More often than not I get the creative inspiration for my artwork from music, movies, or books. In this case I was inspired by watching the music video “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga. I found the colors, objects and symbols that repeated throughout the video (mostly associated with cards and gambling), to be a great source of design inspiration. Feeling the need to work more with closeups I decided that the stock image on the cover of Issue 55 of Advanced Photoshop Magazine, would be perfect for this project.