Following an announcement late last week that two ArenaNet
artists, Richard Anderson and Kekai Kotaki, were awarded Gold Medals in the
upcoming Spectrum 18 art book, the focus on the astounding ArenaNet art team
continues on the developer’s official blog.

Founded by ArenaNet artist Jason Stokes, FUTUREPOLY is
launching an eight-week long online master class beginning on April 2nd.
The Online Masterclass in Digital Painting will meet once a week, and features a
series of lectures and painting demonstrations by ArenaNet artists whose names should
be familiar to most of you. The Master Instructors for the class include Daniel
Dociu, Kekai Kotaki, Richard Anderson, Jason Stokes, and more.

Be sure to scroll down to the end of this post to see the award winning
artwork in the upcoming Spectrum 18 art book by two of the Master Instructors
listed above, Richard Anderson and Kekai Kotaki.

But first, some additional details about FUTUREPOLY
from the official blog post including where to sign up for the course can be
found below:

Founded in 2010 by Jason Stokes, FUTUREPOLY is dedicated to
providing digital artists with a practical, focused education geared towards
video game development. Students learn from instructors with decades of
professional experience.

To learn more about FUTUREPOLY and
this advanced course, visit
their web page. Space is limited though – reserve your spot now!

This is an amazing opportunity for any aspiring artists out there. I'm
actually temped to look into it myself, although considering the fact that my
last formal course work in art was about 15 years ago when I dropped out of grad
school (intaglio is awesome, but didn't exactly open up too many career paths
back in the mid '90s) I'm not too sure if I'd be up for diving directly into an
advanced course like this.

But if any of
you sign up I would definitely love to hear about your experiences! Feel free to shoot me a
PM here on our Guild Wars 2 forums, or you can also email me directly: sardu [at] tentonhammer.com

Kekai Kotaki
won Spectrum’s Gold Medal for Concept Art for this impressive piece of Guild
Wars 2 art entitled “Riven Earth.”

Richard
Anderson won the Gold Medal for Institutional Art for this luminous,
evocative piece of GW2 art called “Knight March.”