Ballistic Publishing recently graced Sketchfeed with a review copy of Exotique 5 – The World’s Most Beautiful CG Characters. We take a quick look in the hopes of helping you determine whether it’s worth picking up.

Let’s face it, we never really tire of gazing at vulnerable, sword-wielding digital beauties in all manner of undress. After all, isn’t that the real reason we became artists? Exotique 5 certainly delivers–not only amazing girls–but a little something for everyone. And don’t worry, there’s a fair share of creatures, dragons, bots, and monsters too. Science Fiction and Fantasy characters are the dominating themes, which reflects the scope of featured professional artists that hail from the game and film industries. Most of the images are purely 2D, with a few ZBrush and Maya/3DS Max artists represented as well.

Commissioned art is included from the likes of Sony Online Entertainment, ArenaNet, ImagineFX, Alderac Entertainment, Wizards of the Coast, and Games Workshop, as well as numerous independent pieces. Ballistic selects it’s content from artist submissions, which they announce from their web site. If you’re an artist looking to receive some good exposure, be sure to keep your eye out for such announcements.

As you can see, there’s some serious eye candy and inspirational material here. As always, print and binding quality of the book is top notch, with heavy-gloss paper stock–and should hold up to a number of serious coffee-table perusals.

If you’re a serious collector of printed digital art compilations, then you don’t need us to tell you that Exotique 5 is worth the $52 USD price tag (or $115 for the mega-elite Special Edition). In fact, you probably already have a copy. Otherwise, this publication makes the perfect holiday gift for the artist or fans of fantasy art. And speaking of holidays, Ballistic is currently running a 20% Christmas discount for paid CGSociety members.

And just so you know, we searched around for a cheaper price, but didn’t really find any better options at the time of this writing. Perhaps that will change as other vendors pick it up. I never like to buy something before finding out if it can be had cheaper elsewhere. In this case, buying straight from the publisher is probably a safe bet.

Check out the Exotique 5 web page to make a purchase or preview the book in it’s entirety online. Also see Neville dSouza’s article on CGSociety, detailing his process for the creation of Exotique 5’s cover image.

Things are ramping back up around here after a bit of a hiatus. Sketchfeed is now on Twitter; so you can connect with us there as well. So what else is going on today?

• Massive Black/Conceptart.org is hosting an opportunity to get your portfolio reviewed this week by top industry professionals.
• The new ImagineFX cover art by Warren Louw is sexy as hell. You can also see the original here.
• Final Light has released Explosion Toolkit HD, a collection of explosion stock footage and effects for your action sequences.
• Jon Foster of scifi/fantasy book cover fame has a new web site.
  
• Ballistic Publishing recently released d’artiste: Character Modeling 3 with character creation tutorials from master artists Jan-Bart van Beek, Giovanni Nakpil, and Cesar Dacol Jr. A limited edition will also go on sale this Wednesday.

Massive Black is having a Halloween sale on their art instructional DVD’s, video downloads, and streaming classes. Check them out at media.massiveblack.com.

Sale ends Monday at 11:00am Pacific time.

The 7th edition of Ballistic Media’s digital art showcase publication is now available:

Ballistic Publishing is proud to announce the pinnacle of digital art with EXPOSÉ 7, the latest book in its groundbreaking series celebrating the Finest Digital Art in the Known Universe. With more art, more artists, and a judging panel unanimous in its praise for the remarkable standard of work, EXPOSÉ 7 showcases a talented community of digital artists and their inspirational art.

“There is some fantastic work in there and it was extremely hard to choose what to omit,” explains Max Dennison, EXPOSÉ 7 advisory board member and founder of Matte Painting UK. “On the whole the quality of entries was brilliant and the complexity of ideas was astonishing—better than last year I believe!”

Get more info or purchase here.

Massive Black has teamed up with Ballistic Publishing to release a compilation of artwork by the Massive Black team. From the press release:

Massive Black: Volume 1 brings together more than 700 pieces of artwork by the Massive Black team from studios in North America and Asia. A foreword by Oddworld’s Lorne Lanning provides an entertaining view of his dealings with Massive Black and his thoughts on what makes it such a unique artist-focused company, while Jason Manley (co-founder of Massive Black) recounts the formation of the company with partners Justin “Coro” Kauffman, and Chris Hatala.

Judging by the contributions to the community by MB, and level of quality we’ve seen from Ballistic, this should make for a good addition to any digital artist’s collection.

The Redmond Arts Commission will be hosting a Digital Arts Festival on October 4th-5th, in Redmond, WA. The presentations and workshops are free of charge, but the event does require registration from their website. Admission fees will be charged for the lunch, Digital Dance Party, and Short Films/Movie Night. Presenters include industry artists from Sega, Microsoft, Valve, and Gas Powered Games.

Artists can also submit their work and register for cash prizes up to $1,000. The deadline for submissions is August 31st.

Wacom today announced a price reduction of $500 for the Cintiq 21UX:

That’s right. We ran out of cozy sweaters to keep Cintiqs warm, but have no fear. We’ve decided to bring you a better offer. Our flagship Cintiq is now $500 less – indefinitely.

Now you can get your very own world-class interactive pen display or only $1999.

If you’ve been holding off on one of these due to budget concerns, perhaps now is the time to take the plunge.