Tabla de contenidos para February 2026 en ImagineFX

As with any job or pursuit, the best results emerge from a well-prepared environment. Art is no exception: a home studio can be just as important to creators as paints and pencils. “Artists create their best work when they can do so in an environment that is comfortable, inviting and practical,” says character designer and illustrator Nuri Durr. “We can spend hours in the same spot toiling away at our art, so it makes sense to customise and tailor our workspace to suit our needs and tastes.” “A good setup is incredibly important when you work from home,” says illustrator and concept artist Anna Podedworna. “Spending eight hours a day in a chaotic or poorly optimised workspace can turn into a hellish experience very quickly. To avoid ending up hating…

When I was setting up this room I knew from the start that I would need a huge table. It runs from the door and curves below the window, and means there’s space for my entire drawing and streaming setup. Not only that, there are two of us in the room, so we’ve split it equally. I have the majority and my man is gaming on his 40cm table allowance… the things we do for love, am I right? I love that whenever I enter my room, I can immediately see the tablet waiting for me. I have to admit that I’m pretty lazy, so if the setup wasn’t ready, I wouldn’t be drawing as often. I’m used to only having one screen, but since it was on the left…

“The first thing I did was watch the movie to get a sense of the mood. I then looked at lots of other artwork. I looked at the official poster, at fan art, everything. Then I thought, ‘Right: what can I do that’s different to that?’ And I remember, I just couldn’t think of anything. It’s so iconic. It’s Star Wars and it’s Darth Vader! This was one of the first times where I watched the film again and I wrote down a list of key things about it. It’s The Empire Strikes Back so it’s got to be the Empire on the poster. Darth Vader is the real big-bad by this point, so he’s got to be imposing in the design, and then the core story is about Luke…

“One of my bucket list projects is to create a racing mecha show” “I live near a bike path, so I often see huge groups of road bikes” Artist PROFILE Wynton Redmond LOCATION: US Wynton is a Los Angeles-based storyboard artist and character designer. He initially worked in IT and web development, but drew for fun on the train to work. After receiving a random email he’s been in the animation industry for the past 10 years. Notable projects include, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Invincible and KPop Demon Hunters. https://wyntonred.com Do you want to share your sketches with your fellow ImagineFX readers? Send us an email with a selection of your art, captions for each piece and a photo and bio of yourself to sketchbook@imaginefx.com…

“The inspiration for this piece came from a photograph of a grasshopper, whose pose as it hung upside down from a branch captivated me. The photograph reminded me of the streetcars that I take every day for my commute. I tried to blend these two very different elements together when creating this piece. In the midst of the bustling city streets, a train with countless mechanical legs slowly crawls into the station, while people wait patiently on the platform. This scene, I hope, adds a touch of whimsy and delight to the otherwise monotonous routine of daily commuting.” Artist PROFILE Xie Xufeng LOCATION: China Xie Xufeng is a concept artist and illustrator in the gaming industry who has done work for major studios. https://bit.ly/4i4g68z…

1 Value sketches I start with rough sketches using no more than three values. If the design feels powerful in just three values, I know I’ve got something promising. From here I work with clean topology, so I can make adjustments and design choices on the go. 2 Applying texture and lighting Since these creatures have a translucent, organic hard-surface, I found that box modelling offers the most forgiving approach. The model is thrown into KeyShot where I set up lighting and apply materials. I test several different lighting scenarios and materials before refining the translucency. I want the refractions to feel chaotic without becoming unreadable. 3 Finalise with Smart Blur filter The model is brought back into Photoshop where I colour adjust, paint over and push shapes. I find…

iPad Pro M5 TOUCH SENSATION Super powerful and pricey as heck, the M5 version of the iPad Pro is the best creative tablet of 2025 Price From £999/$999 Company Apple Web www.apple.com Has the iPad Pro finally become the laptop alternative for creatives that it always promised to be? It’s only taken 10 years of iterative iPad generation updates. The combination of the M5 processor and iPadOS 26, which offers floating, multitasking windows in a way that’s almost 100 per cent usable and not completely annoying, together with a software offering that’s broadening in the direction of creative apps, means it has a lot of computing potential in a thin and ultraportable form. That it still requires multiple accessories and costs as much as a MacBook Pro to get the best…

Price £999/$799 Company Anker Web www.ankersolix.com We were glad to get our hands on the Anker SOLIX C1000. For one thing, it’s the fastest recharging portable power station, as certified by Guinness World Records. Anker’s device is an incredibly well-built portable power station that blends a high power output with reasonable portability. It’s far from small or light, but Anker has succeeded in delivering a form factor that’s ideal for on-the-go creative endeavours as well as off-grid weekend trips, with its solid, comfortable handles built in. The ports are located primarily along the front face with a clean and well-organised layout. There’s a set of four AC outlets that are generously spaced and directly above these are the four USB ports, which are ideal for powering phones, laptops or even…

Brilliant Strokes Procreate Brush Set Artist Paperlike with @Designcal Software Procreate Brushes 10 Price Free Rating Give your digital art a more natural feel with this decent set of free brushes for Procreate, which feature rough edges, shape scatter, colour blending, smudging and bleeding properties. https://bit.ly/3Xi2VqU LP Inking Brushes Artist Lucas Peinador Software Procreate, Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint Brushes 50+ Price £17 Rating A brilliant set of brushes with a strong focus on inking, with options for line, washes, textures and smudging. It comes with a video tutorial to help you capture the raw feel of classic comics. https://bit.ly/4olhXr9 Colorlab For Procreate Artist Retro Supply Software Procreate and your application of choice Brushes 140 Price £31 Rating While expensive for a brush pack, see this more as a full colour…

I started my career just with digital painting, but over the years I began to incorporate more and more 3D techniques to speed up my process. Having a solid understanding of the art fundamentals and 2D skills is essential, but learning how to use 3D – even in a basic way – is very useful for producing quick iterations and making amendments when working with clients. 3D has been incredibly useful in all of my concept art and matte painting work in animation, games and movies. Knowing how to use 3D helps with passing your work on to other departments, creating more images in a shorter amount of time, and working in a non-destructive manner for potential changes. Blender has been my 3D tool of choice because it’s free and…

1 Lay down the initial sketch I begin the artwork by outlining my ideas and composition of the unusual-looking commuter train pulling into a station in monochrome line art. This approach makes it possible for me to quickly visualise the desired shapes and design concepts without becoming distracted by other visual elements. Focusing solely on structural clarity at this stage helps to solidify the foundation before moving on to complex rendering. 2 Value blocking I add greyscale value layers to establish foreground/background relationships. Each object is on a separate layer for organisational efficiency, creating a clear roadmap for colour application later on. 3 Apply colour to the composition I start with flat base colours (local colours), initially avoiding complex colour mixing to maintain clean hue relationships. Once this colour framework…

Price £1,049/$1,179.9 Company HP Web www.hp.com HP has proven itself better than just about anyone at one specific laptop variant: the 2-in-1. While a dedicated drawing tablet might be the preferred choice for creatives, many will want to combine a fully fledged laptop and drawing tablet in one device, and that the HP Omnibook X Flip 16’s selling point. At first sight, the Omnibook looks much like any nondescript enterprise laptop in ubiquitous silver. However, the magic element here are the hinges that continue moving the screen all the way around until it turns into a tent (270 degrees) or a tablet (360 degrees), with the keyboard on the back. The screen orientation flips automatically based on what position you hold the laptop in. Once completely flipped, the Omnibook comes…

Price £2,699/$2,500 Company Acer Web www.acer.com Acer’s latest 14-incher, the Acer Predator Triton 14 AI, comes with the Nvidia Studio logo on the front and studio drivers installed, so it’s fairly clear that the creative arts are well within its sights. With its 50-series GPU and second-generation Lunar Lake Intel Core Ultra processor, this represents the cutting edge of laptop technology at the end of 2025. Yet the Triton’s USP is its size: 14-inch laptops are always compact, but given the kind of ferocious internals it’s stuffed with, being just 17.3mm at its thickest point makes this machine especially slender. The Acer Predator Triton 14 is larger than a MacBook Air, and indeed slightly thicker and wider than a 14-inch MacBook Pro, but still feels compact when you pick it…

Colouring an object in 3D is one of the more complex parts of learning 3D. It’s not the same as assuming the colour you see on-screen is the object’s colour. Some 3D programs, especially those focused on design or those showing a simplified viewport view, will colour an object to make it easier to manipulate and edit, rather than to reflect the material assigned to it. The first complication to understand is that, in many cases, the colour of the object you see when you render (the term for an output image of what the 3D application sees through the camera) has little to do with the object itself. Instead, it comes from the material applied to the 3D object. As far as the 3D application is concerned, a material…

1 Soft normals If you create a basic polygon model such as a sphere, by default the surface will look smooth so you don’t see each and every face and edge. This gives it the appearance that it’s higher quality than it actually is. 2 Harden your normals If you choose to harden the normals on the model (again, this will be a simple option in your chosen 3D application), you can clearly see each and every polygon, in addition to their edges. 3 Display the normals If you display the vertex normals, which are the little green lines shown above, you can clearly see the difference. The softer-looking sphere’s normals are more aligned with each other, which enables them to blend into those surrounding it. On the hardened sphere…

SAVE UP TO 45%* PLUS FREE DIGITAL ACCESS TO 150+ ISSUES** FANTASY ART ESSENTIALS EBOOK FOR EVERY NEW SUBSCRIBER This is the perfect time to take out a subscription to ImagineFX, because as well as saving up to 45 per cent off the store price of the magazine, you’ll also receive our Fantasy Art Essentials special issue as an ebook. Inside its 148 pages you’ll find galleries of inspirational imagery, interviews with fantasy art trailblazers, and plenty of art advice and techniques for you to use in your own art workflow. And because it’s an ebook, Fantasy Art Essentials can be accessed instantly on your phone or tablet! PRINT PLUS FREE DIGITAL ACCESS • Six months of the print edition • No-hassle home delivery • Pay less than you would in the…

Over the years the ImagineFX team has seen its fair share of art books that have original narratives running through them. However, Shanghai-based Liang Mark’s CROW has really grabbed our attention. Not only is the Riot Games art director’s book packed with visuals of lavish locations, otherworldly ship designs and intriguing character concepts, but the story has plenty of scope too. It centres on the renewal of a futuristic civilisation. In CROW’s sci-fi universe, the world has been reorganised and a core resource – codenamed ‘Crow’ – is being fought over by five major factions. Liang’s influences come from a range of movies, sci-fi novels and games, such as Star Wars, Dune, Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation, as well as video games such as Homeworld. “I love stories set in the…

Rich in heritage, illustrated movie posters have been enjoying a resurgence and renewal in recent years. A leading exponent of this renaissance is Matt Ferguson. Over the past decade and a half, Matt’s work has played its part in reinvigorating the poster-art tradition for science fiction, fantasy and horror movies – both new titles and anniversary rereleases. Matt, how did your fascination with visual art and design evolve? As a teenager, I got heavily into video games and taught myself Photoshop and a bit of 3D so that I could start editing and adding to video games, like Quake. That almost turned into a career when I got a job offer from a games studio when I was 17. I did that on and off and I got some credits…

“This article is on my reinterpretation of Singed from the Arcane TV show. The main goal of this artwork was to study and translate the stylised shapes and dynamic proportions defined by Arcane’s artistic direction. I also focused on recreating the painterly texture treatment seen in the show. Another important objective was developing a clean, low-poly topology suitable for video game production. My top tip for approaching this style is to practise 2D painting studies in Photoshop, as it greatly helps in better understanding Arcane’s shapes, brushwork and visual language. It also helped refine my sculpting workflow and overall artistic decisions.” Artist PROFILE Yohan Houel LOCATION: France Yohan is a character artist and concept artist. He studied 3D modelling and concept art at New3dge school in Paris, before working with the…

“Throughout my life I’ve taken inspiration from the Combine in Half-Life 2. The creatures from that universe have this brilliant blend of insect and machine, to the point where it’s impossible to tell if it’s a machine-augmented bug or the other way around. For my Shimmer line-up, I wanted to capture that same feeling but in my own way. Something that feels alien, with a strong sense of mystery. A bit gross, but also beautiful. I combined DNA from sea life, 80s-style chrome machines and the glass-like tubes seen in custom PCs to create something fresh.” Artist PROFILE Max Froer LOCATION: US Max is a principal concept artist working at ProbablyMonsters. He enjoys a wide variety of styles and genres, but his comfort food is science fiction and creature design. https://bit.ly/4is5i4c…

Publisher Domestika Price £39.90 Format Online Length 5h 11m (20 lessons) Web www.domestika.org This five‑hour Domestika course has been put together by Finnish artist Mikko Eerola, who has worked as a professional concept artist across video games, TV and film, and is also an art teacher and YouTuber. He has a range of painting styles, making this is an excellent choice for those new to art and who want to get the most from Procreate. The 20 lessons are designed to teach the fundamentals of imagination without having to wait for inspiration. To Mikko’s credit, this course is full of resources in terms of background references, and this is where his strength as a YouTube teacher really does shine through. For example, although the art created is full of detail,…

1 Blocking and sculpting the base form First, I start with a Dynamesh in ZBrush to establish the basic form. I like using the Clay Buildup brush with a Lazy step of 0.01 for cleaner strokes. Once the main shapes are set and unlikely to change drastically, I ZRemesh for secondary and tertiary passes. Along the way, I also experiment with Noises and Cavity masks for additional detail. 2 Decimation, UVs and texturing After that, I decimate the model to create a low-poly version, then generate automatic UVs in Rizom. Now I have both a high-poly and low-poly mesh, ready for baking in Substance and starting the texturing process. While texturing, I focused on maintaining the rough sculpture feel and experimented with combining cold and warm tones, using mostly cold…