I’ve been making digital art since I was a kid. I remember making drawings pixel by pixel in Deluxe Paint on my Amiga. As I got older, my interest in computer art waned and I concentrated on traditional mediums. It wasn’t until college that I discovered the awesomeness of Photoshop and rediscovered my love for creating digital art. Since then, I’ve honed my Photoshop skills and studied other graphic arts programs like Illustrator, Painter, Flash and Maya. I’ve come a long way from drawing copies of Super Mario Brothers in my mom’s basement, but I still have miles to go before I can even hope to reach the level of Bert Monroy.

Red Truck by Bert Monroy

If you pay attention at all to digital art, you have probably already heard of Bert Monroy. He has been working in digital art since 1984 and has an impressive portfolio. His style is hyper-realism. That’s right, his shit looks so real, it’s realer than real. He wrote the book on Photoshop – literally! He was one of the coauthors of the very first Photoshop book: The Official Adobe Photoshop Handbook. Now there are more Photoshop books than there are stars in the sky.

Lunch in Tiberon by Bert Monroy

What I like most about Monroy’s artwork is that it is all done by hand. He sketches the scene that he’s working on, and although he uses photographs for references, he doesn’t trace them.

Oakland by Bert Monroy

His most recent project, which took him four years to create, is a 5’ by 25’ painting of Times Square. No, I didn’t mean inches, I meant five feet tall by twenty five feet wide. According to his website, it weighs in at 6.5 gigabytes – after flattening. It’s composed of almost three thousand files and contains over 500,000 layers! Just the file management alone is a Herculean feat. Please go to Bert Monroy’s website to see this piece as he has it set up so you can zoom in as much as you want to see all of the detail he put into it.

All Images are property of Bert Monroy www.bertmonroy.com.