A Celebration Of Art - Paint Like A Master with Fay Sirkis is the new video training DVD for those who want to learn to paint digitally using Painter X and Adobe Photoshop. It is hosted by Fay Sirkis, an internationally recognized portrait artist, photographer, and instructor. The video is published by National Association of Photoshop Professionals, or NAPP. If you are not familiar with NAPP, please read my review on Photoshop User magazine to gain more insight on what NAPP is all about and why you might want to join.

Paint Like A Master is contained on a single DVD that runs 222 minutes and can only be used on a computer. It is aimed at users new to digital painting and want to move into this medium. The author goes over the material in 23 lessons.

Lesson 1, "Analyze the Image" examines what you need to do to simulate the look of a fine art painting. Here you will look at primarily simulating watercolor and oil, what to look for, and how to set each up. Lesson 2, "The Sandwich" is a technique that will allow you to color-correct your image, especially in situations where you have multiple areas of highlights and shadows.  Lesson 3, "Final Preparation" shows you additional sandwich steps that will help you prepare skin conditions to handle blemishes and wrinkles before heading into Painter.

Lesson 4, "Wacom Tablets" instructs you on some really key ways to set up your Wacom Tablet to work with Painter much more efficiently. This includes launching Photoshop and Painter from the tablet as well as undo and changing brush size.

Lesson 5 & 6, "Painter X" takes on the tasks of first introducing some of the new features to Painter X and how some of these will be further addressed in later lessons. Then we are walked through the interface and how to use Painter X in general.

Lesson 7, "The Cloners" describes the use of the Clone stamp functionality within Painter. In this lesson, you will see how the use of the Cloners can really be powerful if used correctly. The instructor also gives a number of 'little' tips that can really be helpful while using this tool. Lesson 8, "The Blenders" takes a look at what blenders are and how they can be used in Painter. This lesson also does a good job at looking at the Re-saturation (Resat) control on the brush info bar as well.