Here is this week's selection of outstanding digital art and design. Don't forget to check out the inspirational/motivational quote after the showcase!

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Corals are marine organisms that typically live in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps."

There are 3 types of corals:

1. Perforate corals – corals can be perforate or imperforate. Perforate corals have porous skeletons which allow their polyps to connect with each other through the skeleton. Imperforate corals have hard solid skeletons. These types of coral are often found in coral reefs and shallow, tropic waters.
2. Hermatypic corals – also known as stony corals which build reefs. They convert surplus food to calcium carbonate forming a hard skeleton.
3. Ahermatypic corals – do not build reefs and are also known as soft corals. They are flexible and are often perforated, with a lacy appearance.

The types of coral explains why some look like rocks and some like flowers. There are many, many species of coral, some quite unspectacular, but many are breath-takingly eye-catching.

This showcase features 20 stunning examples of colourful coral photography, and some include a few coral residents.

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For some reason unknown to myself, I am fascinated by digital colouring. With such software as Photoshop and it’s layer modes, the job is made relatively simple if the original image works well with the techniques used.

In this short tutorial I will be showing you two very easy ways to create selective colour in a photograph. We will be looking at desaturating parts of a colour photo and colourising parts of a black and white photo. Each method works better with different subjects.

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Some digital artists simply love to portray their favourite characters from film, TV, console/PC games, cartoons, books, etc. Sometimes they reproduce them faithfully, straight from an original scene, and sometimes they put their own slant on them.

Here I am showcasing 20 awesome fan art illustrations created by very talented artists.

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Creating surreal art through traditional media, digital painting or photo manipulation is a skill and requires thinking outside the box, but creating a surreal photograph is a whole different matter.

To create a great surreal photograph, the photographer has to start off by being exceptionally creative. Then he/she has to maybe be in the right place at the right time to get an 'other worldly' shot, or has to get into strange and probably very uncomfortable positions to take the photograph from an angle not normally seen, or maybe get themselves and/or their model in unusual positions, or place items where they wouldn't normally be.

Whichever method has been used in the following showcase, the photographers have achieved some outstandingly surreal results that us mere mortals can only wonder at!

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Here is this week's round-up of outstanding digital art and design. Don't forget to check out the motivational/inspirational quote after the showcase!

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It could be considered that we are presently in the 'Digital Art Movement', but really we are at the start of it, and it is probably a trend that will continue for a very long time.

It is hard to believe that digital illustrations will improve upon what they are today, but with painting software moving forward in leaps and bounds, and artists now studying digital art as a stand-alone art form, we have to consider that in the future there will be amazing improvements.

This showcase features some outstandingly talented digital artists and their illustrations of animals. These images range from photo-realistic to cartoon-style and everything in between.

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Sunrise, also referred to as dawn or daybreak, are in fact different times of the day. According to Wikipedia sunrise is the instant at which the upper edge of the sun appears above the horizon in the east, and dawn is the time when the sky begins to lighten, but before the sun actually appears, and daybreak can apply to either sunrise or dawn.

Sunset colours are usually more brilliant than sunrise colours, however, this showcase features some very vivid sunrise colours, along with the paler colours usually associated with colder weather.

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Here is a free set of gradients for Photoshop based on the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The set contains 34 gradients and is completely free and unrestricted.

Click on the image to download the .grd file.

I hope you can use them and enjoy them!

Science Fiction is a very popular art and film genre, so I have collected 20 stunning free wallpapers based on sci-fi.

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