Lea - Beyond Photoshop

Issac Stolzenbach

Foreword by Issac Stolzenbach, former Managing Editor, Photoshop User magazine; current Managing Editor of Layers: The How-to Magazine For Everything Adobe.

The Quintessential Amalgamation of Inspirational and Instructional

This ambitious book you hold in your hands is exactly the book that you or I would've written had we the talent, training, timeand fewer excusesas Professor Derek Lea. Thankfully, Derek didn't take the excuse-laden path of least resistance. Instead, he undertook the arduous challenge of mastering the hottest software in the creative market. He studied the interoperability of these programs, plucking out the most useful bits of each experience, and incorporated them into his own workflow, which resulted in a bounty of stunning artwork. He kept notes along the way and vetted the resulting techniques by sharing them with the creative communities behind such award-winning publications as Photoshop User, Computer Arts and Computer Arts Projects, Digital Camera, .net, Advanced Photoshop, and Digital Creative Arts magazines.

Sounds good, right? But is this book for you. Go ahead and flip through the pages and see if the artwork speaks to you, then come on back here and I'll tell you why this book is probably for you, and why it's an essential next step in Derek's oeuvre.

Welcome back! That's some killer artwork, right? This guy's got an eye for aestheticsand he knows how to communicate that vision tooyou'll actually learn how to do that stuff. What? Yeah, sure thing, go head up to the checkout counter, we'll chat more when you get this home.

Derek has been a professional digital artist for more than a decade and he learned how to use creative software the same way most of us do (for the most part): we poke around in Photoshop, exploring the tools and menu items, then, once we're overwhelmed from being unable to reach our artistic vision due to the technical complexity of the software, we head up to the bookstore or library and seek out work from someone who is both inspired and inspiringan all too rare combination. We may or may not grab the book based on the images we see within or perhaps the random, gonzoesque wordfreak blathering in the foreword persuades us to make the purchase. Either way, if we do end up taking the book home, when we get it home and take a closer look, we find that the author is either a talented artist or a gifted teacherit's the rarest Pokmon to find both powers in the same creatureand we find this time and time again. The techniques are awesome, but the artist doesn't aptly communicate everything they're doing, so the book gets chucked into the inspirational pile. Or the techniques are written in a way that resonates in our heads and our brains sop up the information like a biscuit on that last splash of Sunday gravy: we finally learn those shortcuts; we discover where to go to make our own shortcuts; andafter gaining a little dexterity in our fingerswe realize that using them is indeed a faster way to work. That sort of book does teach us something, but our artwork will still suck because the author was an educator, not an artist. The book's images were picked up from a stock photography agency and the end results are meekly presented as being for demonstration purposes only.

I've edited Derek's work for a number of years. It's been a pleasure because the guy really gets itthe art, the people, the culture, the softwarewith the digital arts community. What was really compelling about his work was that it got us up from our desks and engaged with the world around us. He had us dusting off old scanners, blow-drying fax paper, and cleaning out the gutterserrr wait, that was the wife. Anyway, it was sneaky, getting us out of our chairs to go collect a few leaves, but the end result was gloriouswe discovered that there is a whole world out there just dying to be incorporated into our designs by our own hand. It sounds novel now, but after living day-in-and-day-out in the digital darkroom, your eyes will go from squinting like a prisoner in Plato's cave to wide-eyed revelation when exposed to the light of this sort of knowledge.

When Derek asked me to write the foreword to his next book, I was flattered and compelled. Flattered because the guy has been such an inspirational educator to me and to many of the folks with whom I've worked. Compelled because if ever a forthright handful of words need be said about one educator among the sea of digital arts instructors out there, it's Derek Lea.

He's inspiring to me because he works in much the same way I do: Crank up the tunes, let the eyes roll back and allow the mind's eyefloating in that personal, ethereal realm between magic and matter; between id and ego; between life and deathto take control, and create. Create! Create! He's an inspiration to the people I work with because his techniques are not only fresh, but they don't get the reader all tangled up in the overly technical tomfoolery that some use to baffle the reader with their wisdom rather than propel them into manifesting beauty through simplicity.