Foreword

Back in the early 1990s, people in the former Eastern Bloc countries were just getting used to their new freedoms. I was at university, and one of my lecturers commented that after so many years of state-controlled media, television was their window on the world. It’s something that’s stuck with me, and I think that if television can be a window on the world, then perhaps Photoshop is a window on the imagination.

Round about the same time, in the early 1990s, the first versions of the program were being developed very much with photo editing in mind. I remember getting my first Macintosh and installing an old version of doubtful legality. (Hey, I was just a student!) Having scanned in some photos of a fellow journalism student, and cropping his head into a triangle shape, I began duplicating it across the document and applying different combinations of sharpen, blur, and posterize filters to each version of his now sorry-looking face.

I knew what I created wasn’t at all good but others were impressed for roughly 15 minutes, which made me feel like I’d been a bit of an Andy Warhol — for just about that long.

Fast forward 5 or 6 years and while I still couldn’t create anything from my own imagination using Photoshop, or even crayon for that matter, I had discovered a man who could. Derek Lea was producing illustrations for us on Computer Arts magazine, the likes of which we’d never seen. A colleague of mine at the time suggested that not only should we ask Derek to create an image for us, but what if we asked him to produce a step-by-step article, complete with screenshots, showing how his piece was developed. I called Derek up, he accepted, and I promised him a beer the next time I was in Toronto.

We didn’t realize it at the time but we had unleashed a new force in the world of art and illustration. Derek was showing our readers how they could use Photoshop creatively and artistically. Pretty soon other magazines, both within our own group and rivals, picked up on Derek’s talent. He’s gained illustration clients around the world, written books, and won awards.

His edge is that he won’t stand still, and this new edition of his book brings the proof. Despite the magic of Photoshop, digitally retouched images often leave viewers cold, and to combat this, many creatives bring natural media elements into their artwork. For a number of years Derek has been enthusiastically mixing media like watercolors and inks, papers, paint on wood — not to mention found objects — and photographs. The skills involved in combining real-world richness with the flexibility of Photoshop are at your disposal in the new section in this edition.

Some of the commissions I’ve sent Derek over the years appear in these pages, where you can follow how they were made. Once again it’s been an honor to write this foreword. As for my own Photoshop skills, I figured I’d quit while I was ahead back in the 1990s. Derek Lea is your man when it comes to image creation — I stick to the words.

Garrick Webster
Writer and magazine editor
(Former editor of Computer Arts, 3D World, and
Cre@te Online)