d’artiste Fashion Design is the latest Ballistic Publishing offering, and offers many techniques from a few critically acclaimed artists. The main focus of this book is of course fashion design, but more specifically it demonstrates how to add outstanding fashions to your character designs.
As always, flicking through this book made me realize just how much we overlook the amount of detail that is pumped into crafting any type of character design; whether for a video game, painting or animation. Fashion Design is a collection of tutorials and galleries from three prolific artists. The artists featured are Alessia Zambonin, Annie Stegg, and Lois van Baarle. It’s also worth mentioning that these artists have done work for video games, which further shows how much artists are under appreciated when it comes to mainstream media works.
Each artist has their own area of focus, Alessia Zambonun teaches how to create realistic looking fabrics using Photoshop. Alessia has done work for DC Comics and an RPG game named Stratelibri. Annie Stegg‘s tutorials focus more on the immediate character design, showing how to incorporate different types of clothing which tell a story. She has done work for Hi-Rex Studios (The company behind Global Agenda), Tikki Games, Addicting Games and Spil Games. Lois van Baarle has a more animated style, and her tutorials focus on using shape, movement and silhouette’s to create a full body portrait.
There are also many collaborative works shown in their collections so you can get an idea of their previous works. Annie Stegg is by far my favourite artist in Fashion Design as I find her designs to be very thorough, but all three featured artists show outstanding work. This book is in no way a start to finish guide on how to create a masterpiece, it merely showcases the works of each artist and allows them to detail a few of their techniques. Thus the book is worth a read whether you are an artist in practice or just a fan of art.
Anyone familiar with Ballistic Publishing knows exactly what to expect in terms of the quality of the book. There’s the usual slip cased and limited editions, and either one is a treasure to hold. I have been fortunate enough to be able to collect a few of these books and just being able to flick through and see these artists works does wonders for my personal creativity. Although the artists contribute to it, it’s mainly Ballistic Publishing’s presentation that will have you picking up these books at random to enjoy a catalogue of stunning visuals.
