The 3D Art Direct Podcast: 3D Digital Art | Artist Interviews | Digital Art Conferences | Sci-fi and Fantasy Genres

Suzi Amberson is from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. She worked in the Insurance industry for 24 years before discovering a passion for digital art. Once Suzi realized she was not following her intended path she took a huge leap of faith and left the Insurance business to pursue her enthusiasm for creating 3D art.

Suzi is a self-taught artist. She started out with Poser 6 in 2007. Her CG toolbox has expanded over the past few years and now includes Poser Pro 2012, Photoshop CS5 Extended, a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet, Marvelous Designer 2, Hexagon and Bryce as her tools of choice.

She entered her first official art contest in 2009 over on the Daz3D website. The challenge was to create an image in the spirit of the infamous fantasy artist, Frank Frazetta. The final judging was conducted by Frank Frazetta Jr. One of her entries took third place and fuelled her desire to pursue 3D art as she sought to add interest and depth to her spectacular body of work.

The URL for Suzi’s gallery is http://kachinadoll.deviantart.com/

- How to generate new ideas for your artwork by creating an Influence Map

- The story of Suzi quitting her job to pursue a career in digital artwork. 

- Marvelous Designer 2

- What is steampunk and what attracts Suzi to this art genre.

- Suzi walks us through her favourite steam punk pieces.

- Making the most of DeviantArt.   

- Tips on getting lighting correct for a scene. 

Welcome to the 3D Art Direct Podcast Session 3

I’d like to introduce Rob Caswell, a DAZ 3D Studio artist who grew up during the space race and spent his time watching the Apollo moonshots as well as bat girl on TV, and then managed to avoid these distractions just enough to gain a degree in astronomy.

He has a popular space on DeviantArt, with the moniker as “Arcas-Art”, that includes a well written blog and gallery of renders created with DAZ 3D Studio and post processing with Photoshop.

Rob has a good grounding in multiple visual art zones, including science fiction & fantasy illustration for paper and pen RPGs, computer game art and comic book lettering.

Rob has a good selection of general Science Fiction and Star Trek Art in his portfolio, including mock up book covers. There's also some art based on a running theme of "Spy Girls". 

He’s currently living in Western Massachusetts, operating a digital print business.

In the interview we cover:-

- All about Star Trek mock-up Book Covers 

- The Spy Girls series with Rob's character “Cassie Blaine”. 

- A drawback of 3D Digital Art is that it is easy to have a lack of focus. You can “doodle” for a long time.

- Likening 3D digital art to “virtual photography”, taking elements that already exist and use these in a unique way from the artist’s own skills and imagination

- Figure work, the more you tweak, the better your chances of imbuing a sense of life and personality.

Welcome to the 3D Art Direct Podcast Session 2

Session 2 includes Nine Essential Composition Tips for Digital Artists, a special offer of a 70% reduction on Poser version 8, an editorial on collaborative art and the promotion of those artists covered in our free monthly magazine of issue 17, including Bjorn Malmberg (Poser, Hexagaon and Vue), Ryan Malone (Poser and Vue), Lewis Moorcroft (Mojoworld) and Glenn Clovis (Photoshop).

Sign up to get our free monthly on-line magazine at www.3dartdirect.com.

Welcome to the 3D Art Direct Podcast Session 1

In this session we introduce 3D Art Direct's mission statement to help and inspire 3D digital artists. There's a brief introduction about me, Paul Bussey, the editor of 3D Art Direct magazine, and I promote four artists published in issue 16 of our magazine, Tarik Keskin, Neil Thacker, DeeDee Davies and Les Garner from Sixus1 Media.

There's a tribute to Ralph McQuarrie who inspired many a digital artist and we paint a potted history of his involvement with George Lucas and Star Wars in his influence on the eventual box office success of this movie and its sequels.