A Collection of Helpful Websites for Digital Artists

October 16th, 2008 | Published in Digital Art 101, Featured, Resources

Here’s a list of websites catering to digital artists of all sorts. If you know of a site that belongs here, please leave a comment below, and I’ll add it. These sites are free, except where noted.

Retouchpro

Retouchpro is a forum with a focus on photo retouching, but topics include many areas of digital art. The Photo-Based Art subforum is definitely worth a look.

Innographx

The Innographx forum, run by Phyllis Stewart, is a great place to learn and share with some very talented and generous folks. Lots of art challenges to spark your creativity. You can read more about this forum here.

CG Society – The Society of Digital Artists

CGTalk is the name of the CG Society’s forum. The focus here 95% 3D modelling and animation, but there is a forum area for Painter and one for Photoshop. The site is free to use, and contains a ton of stuff, including tutorials, reviews, articles, and portfolio space. There are also paid options for a minimal yearly fee.

Cornucopia 3D

Cornucopia, as I’ve mentioned in past articles, is a site maintained by E-on Software for users of their Vue line of products. The forum is a very helpful, friendly place, and there is a gallery where you can show your work, at no charge. Unlike CG Society, however, the gallery is not set up by user; it’s just a conglomeration of everyone’s work arranged by category. This makes it hard (but not impossible) to view works by a given artist. The store sells 3D models, atmospheres, and scenes at very reasonable prices.

Painter Magazine

The website of the Official Painter Magazine offers free gallery space for individuals, and they host a forum as well.

Digital Painting Forum

Hosted by artist and instructor Marilyn Sholin, the Digital Painting Forum is a forum for digital painters using Corel Painter. This is a fee-based site.

Concept Art

Concept Art has a forum and gallery space. Similar to CG Society, and very active.

deviantArt

Profiled here, deviantArt is the largest online art community. It functions mostly as a gallery, but it’s also very much a social site. It’s also a great way to learn, as I discuss here, due to the dA policy of crediting source images used. A great place to find stock images for fantasy paintings.

Renderosity

No list of digital art sites would be complete without mentioning Renderosity. This site has galleries organized by software, but does not have one devoted solely to Painter. You can create your own gallery of work, free. There’s a large Marketplace, where you can find backgrounds for your images, as well as models, brushes, and lots of other useful stuff. The focus here is mostly Poser. There’s also a forum.

GFX Artist

GFX Artist is a site with over 60,000 members. Hosted galleries come with paid membership, though limited membership is available for free. There’s a lot of high quality work in the galleries, and there’s a community forum, as well.

ImagineFX

This is the website for ImagineFX magazine, a fantasy digital art magazine from the UK. There are over 120 tutorials (they call them workshops) from the magazine, and the files for each are available for download. This makes it an incredible learning resource. Plus, you can show off your work in your own gallery, and with any luck it’ll appear in a forthcoming issue of the magazine. They’ve also got a forum.

Geek at Play Studio

Geek at Play is a great resource for Vue artists. There are a ton of video tutorials, free to view, dealing with absolutely every aspect of E-on’s Vue Infinite software. You can also, for a small fee, buy these tutorials as DVDs or as downloads, which is convenient, and a nice way to show your appreciation for the all great tutorials these guys are putting out there for free. They also frequently have free models, materials, and atmospheres for download. If you’re into Vue, you need to check this site out. There are also free tutorials here for Poser, DAZ Studio, and Hexagon. A real gold mine.

3D Total

3D Total is a commercial site offering a fair amount of free models, textures, and tutorials. 3D Total sells textures that are top-notch, and will add real professionalism to your renders. They also produce two online magazines, and host many eye-popping images, produced by some of the best 3D artists in the world.