Red River Pro
BERT MONROY

The Graphic Artist
Bert Monroy embraced the computer as an artistic medium early on and is considered one of the pioneers of digital art. His work has appeared in every major trade publication of the computer industry and has also been featured in scores of books, many of which he has authored. His clients include Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Pioneer Electronics, Fujitsu, SONY, AT&T, Chevron and American Express. His painting, Damen Station, has won acclaim as a masterpiece of digital art.

The Client
Personal project with the objective of future sales.

© Bert Monroy

The Assignment
Paint a photo-realistic panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago transit Authority.

The Execution
"Adobe Illustrator was used for generating the majority of the basic shapes as well as all the buildings in the Chicago skyline. The rest was created in Photoshop. I consider myself a Hyper-realist artist and the
incredible challenge of recreating reality is my motivation."

Post Production
"The painting is comprised of close to fifty individual Photoshop files. Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains more than 15,000 layers. Over 500 alpha channels were used for
various effects and over 250,000 paths make up the multitude of shapes throughout the scene. The image size is 40 inches by 120 inches and the flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes. It took me
eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create."

The Output
"While writing my latest book, Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy: Digital Painting, it was crucial to see how colors worked together on a spread. I used a Red River paper that closely matched the white and
finish of the final paper that the book would end up being printed on. I went through a lot of ink and paper but the result is a book that captures the intense colors of my original works. Proofing each spread
on Red River paper was vital to the success of the book because it gave me an accurate preview of how every color would look."

Contact
Bert Monroy's web site is at: www.bertmonroy.com He may be contacted at: bert@bertmonroy.com