No matter what level you’ve reached in your career or journey as a designer, there is always room for improvement! Today I’m going to cover a few ways you can improve your design skills and reach your next level.

Force of Nature is a fairly simple image to create but uses several techniques in combination to accomplish something clean and visually dynamic.

OASIS is something I came up with while looking at an old piece of work “Star Girl I”. I realized since working on that image that my skills have progressed a great deal and wanted to see what I could do with that stock image today, and that is how I made my start on this project.

Herald of Devotion is part of my Herald series just like Herald of Creation, the next one in the series that I will be working on is Herald of Destruction.

Herald of Creation was a nice chance to use some of my favorite photo manipulation techniques in an interesting way and combine them with some vectors from Go Media.

I’m really excited about this! It was a great honor to be featured in Photoshop Creative’s Reader’s Gallery section. Four of my favorite pieces of art were featured in this month’s issue including: Energetic and Celestial Being.

Raven Dawn II is a follow up to my original Raven Dawn image using what I’ve learned since that time. For this image I took a simple and clean stylish approach.

I really enjoyed working on this particular image. Look at me was a chance to try out some new techniques. I did extensive retouch work to this image including, completely recreating the eyes and lips, whitening the teeth, and smoothing the skin.

I used different adjustment layers to really get the image to pop. The butterfly wings I did myself using a reference. The model in this image was great and had very unique and expressive features that allowed this image to work the way I imagined it.

With the release of the new God of War 3 video game I couldn’t help but notice a great deal of artwork in the online community that relates to the game. Much of it is quite amazing!

It’s been a while since I had a featured artist on the blog but I’m really excited about this one. Zach Bush is one of my favorite digital artist on deviantart and his work happened to be featured on the cover of the same issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine that I happened to appear in this month.

Celestial Being was one of my personal favorite images, it was featured in Advanced Photoshop Magazine issue 67.

Touched is one my favorite new pieces that will be featured in my upcoming book, this image was also featured in Advanced Photoshop Magazine issue 67 (march/april 2010).

I wanted to create something using this stock for quite a while. From the moment I saw it I knew that I wanted to try to make this concept work. Part of the image of course alludes to Pinnochio, but I also wanted to add a metaphysical aspect to it.

Its just another Music Monday. I haven’t done one in a while and for that I sincerely apologize. Everything has just taken a back seat to working on my book ARTFUL MANIPULATIONS lately, which I’m happy to say is nearly done.Today’s Music Monday Inspirational image is one that I’m really proud of!

Today’s featured artist has some truly amazing work, particularly some prints available through deviantart.com. Alexiuss is an amazing digital artist based out of Canada with a fantastic array of dark artwork. In fact I have to honestly say this represents some of the best dark artwork I’ve seen in the deviantart community.

Today’s artist that I’ve feature has some work that simply blew me away when I saw it. Her work managed to find its way into my favorites collection fairly quickly. She is 27 year old Turkish Graphic Designer Asli Yeniay Kizilay, and her work is just amazing.