Review of The basics of Postwork from ToxicAngel. After a couple of years sitting and fiddling with Poser and Bryce and producing what I considered to be ok work I happened into the online community at large for such artwork. And there I happily stumbled my way across a piece of artwork by ToxicAngel. And thats where it should really have stopped! At that point I should have broken my fingers, taken all my imagination and artistic skill and diverted it into something far less interestinglike brain surgery! You see the situation is this: As a 3D artist, be it in Poser or Bryce, one struggles to produce work that will be visually stunning and yet almost lifelike in its quality..all in tiny little pixels. And one struggles and one struggles until, it is hoped, one starts to produce work to be considered good by ones self and friends..and then you look at a bit of ToxicAngel artwork. Whats left to be said? We have all been there and we have all had to recover from the latest blow to our egos that is the newest piece of art from Janne Pitken. Its not easy to return to your computer screen and get back to work after looking at a piece of art that is so awesome in content and skill as to make your own seem like a pre school doodle. The brilliance of colour, the subtle lighting and blending, the evocative poses and the wicked brilliance of gleaming metal and wet skinwe know what to expect from a piece of ToxicAngel artworkand he never fails to deliver far more than the expected. And then you hear that this master of the digital world has produced a Tutorial booklet on postwork.and then in an online conversation one night he ups and suggests you write a review of it for himand then things go from bad to worse. WHAT YOU GET: Well to be honest as tutorials go most of us are happy with a webpage or two liberally mingled with sections of stage by stage artwork and the suggested tips and hints listed down or over to one side. Hey thats a tutorial..and you know it. And then you download your eagerly awaited Basics of Postwork, all 12.7 megs of it, and watch as a professionally designed and put together, 27-page guide manual unfolds in your Acrobat viewer. It has to be said the tutorial itself is a piece of ToxicAngel artwork. Its well designed, professionally laid out and looks like it means business. You would have no troubles buying this tutorial off a shelf in an art store next to Advanced Body Studies for beginners! All told, you are getting 8 chapters for your hard earned monies. Chapters 2 to 5 are the meat and potatoes of the booklet, with the first and the last couple being round ups and round downs of things to learn and those learnt. All the chapters are filled out with working examples of the artwork we have come to know and love, from the before post work stages through to the after stages and those in between. The stages of the processes are talked through in an easy to understand manner with occasional notes on how to change the process for a different effect. THE STUFF TUTORIALS ARE MADE OF: So what are you going to learn in this sumptuous booklet? The secrets of one of the masters of 3D rendered postwork is what! Chapters include a deeper insight into the techniques of Hair postwork, painting clothing, rain and mist effects and that trademark of everything Toxic , overshooting your lighting effects. Lets look at one section: Adding drips of water. We start with a quick guide of how to make a rain layer in Photoshop. Settings are listed and talked through and in an inspired thought we actually get to see the menu bars in the screenshots! It is possible to view the actual settings used as well as brush types and settings! Janne talks us through the process in three easy steps, each accompanied by a stage-by-stage picture and each listed with the settings used. And this is where the genius of the tutorial booklet really shinesat no point do you get the feeling your going to copy exactly what you have read. This is not a Do it like this guide. Its almost as if you are being taken by the hand and lead through the maze of postwork techniques, occasionally a door will open and you glance just enough within for you to be able to step boldly onto the path and start walking yourself! There is just enough detail and guidance. You wont leap onto your computer and produce a piece of ToxicAngel artwork after reading this. What you will do is start to practice and learn and eventually evolve the techniques in the booklet into your own formwhich is what art is all about. The guide gives you that incentive. It draws you into the techniques and blows away some of the cobwebs, but it also leaves enough of the shadows so that you can discover your own jewels and treasures in the realm of postwork. Each and every section is dealt with logically and thoughtfully. At no time is there a feeling of everybody should know this. There is no looking down from above hint to the way this guide is written. From the use of emoticons to the occasional witty comment from Janne the whole booklet feels and reads very friendly. SUMMING UP: This is a classy product. We know what to expect from a piece of ToxicAngel artwork, and the guide is easily another piece of that artwork. Its professional quality. I can easily see well-thumbed print outs of it being handed around industry graphic studios when they need to get to grips with a new technique or recall how to balance a layer out. And having said that, therein lies my only warning to you looking to buy this tutorial. The title is Basics of Postwork and within that title you should read this: you will need an understanding of the tools of the trade! This is not a beginners guide to rendering and Photoshop. It is assumed you understand the concepts of layers, of blurring, of changing brushes and opacity. You know how to set up your render and your lighting, your textures are done and dusted and your scene is finished as far as the 3D rendering process can take it. This is a guide to those finishing touches that turn a piece of art into a piece of ART! And as Janne says on a couple of occasions through his guide: you will have to put some effort into it!! If you take this guide at face value you have a well written and powerfully designed tutorial guide on Postworking images, and many people might well stop there and produce some wonderful art simply from applying the techniques within to their work. Look closer into the guide and you will find an insight into both Poser and Photoshop that will open new doors on Postwork that you may well not have thought about. It could save you hours of rendering time to get rain, it could cut down on the volumetric lighting in your scene..it wont turn your art into a ToxicAngel masterpiece overnight, but it will certainly put us all in the same ballpark! Neil Jary aka Kirisute 30 August 2002