"If you want to develop an individual look to your work, my advice is not to take the accepted capabilities of a piece of software. Decide what you want to achieve first, and figure out a way of making it happen." - Brian Taylor

The 4x4 Project invited four leading designers celebrated for their experimental work in 3D to create new pieces on the theme of Geometry and Chaos.

In this book you'll find the information and the inspiration to bend tools to your own ends. The designers describe how they use applications including 3ds max, Carrara Studio, and Strata 3D to create the components for their final images, before processing them with Photoshop to add depth, color, texture, and complexity.

This book immerses the reader in the four phases of the process:

Theory: personal accounts of the creative process, manifestos, diaries, mental sketchbooks, and associated ephemera

Geometry and Chaos: the finished original art works

Process: detailed, first hand, technical descriptions of the creation of each piece, along with original source files on the accompanying CD

Noise and Interference: the four designers discuss, sample, and remix their colleagues' work

The 4x4 Project

4 books, each hosting 4 acclaimed and pioneering digital artists who take on one of 4 outsized themes: Light & Dark, Life & Oblivion, Geometry & Chaos, Time & Stasis.

They pick their tools of choice: Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, 3D, or Code.

They create. They debate. They collaborate.

Each book is an original artwork, a manual, a scrapbook, and a laboratory experiment.

The 4x4 Project is completed by the

following books:

Photoshop and Illustrator: light and dark

sean donohue - goingonsix.com
jemma gura - prate.com
nick higgins - print artist
adrian luna - purusdesign.com
Photoshop and Flash: time and stasis
jeremy tai abbett - suture.com karen ingram - krening.com
francine spiegel - tenderoni.com
Generative Design: life and oblivion
golan levin - flong.com
lia - turux.org
adrian ward - auto-illustrator.com


Synopsis
Where do you see geometry? Where do you see chaos? These questions might sound abstract and the concepts elusive, but order-out-chaos is a primal artistic motivation. Equally, recent developments in Chaos theory point to macro-chaos being a natural outcome of micro-level geometric change. Four digital artists use the same industry standard tool, Photoshop 6, used every working day by graphic designers. Deploying pattern tools, actions and behaviours, batch processes and noise filters to create original experimental effects, the initial-sketch-to-finished-work goal of this project exemplifies the theme of evolving order from chaos, or indeed its opposite. This book, one of a set of four which explores the creation of original Photoshop artwork, is structured in four parts per author: art theory; technical tutorial; pictures and illustrations from sketchbook to finished project; peer review (where the other 3 artists working on the same theme review the work).