Well, Julie will by now be sunning herself in the US of A while I’m left here to hold the fort.Sympathy emails are welcome and much appreciated.But seriously, keep your eyes peeled this week for my own updates and be sure to check out the D3 post on our Photoshop Daily news section.

Well, today is my last day at the office for two whole weeks! Finally, my summer holiday has rolled around and after the disappointment of the British ’summer’ this year, I can’t wait to get some sun.Tomorrow I will be heading for some gambling/shopping/site-seeing (did I ever mention my slight poker addiction?!?) in Las Vegas, and next week I’ll be making the drive across to California and setting up in LA for another week.  To say I can’t wait is a bit of an understatement! I’m really looking forward to Disneyland (it is the ‘happiest place on Earth’ after all), Universal Studios, Hollywood. I wonder if Advanced Photoshop needs an American branch?Of course, I’ll be on holiday, but try and stop me taking a million photos of things that could work in digital projects – it’s never far from my mind. I just hope my cameras are up to the challenge – I have a fantastic little Olympus compact and a Kodak prosumer. I must get a DSLR at some point, but I’m sure that I’m going to be pushing excess baggage anyway!  Adam will be looking after everything in the Advanced Photoshop world for the next two weeks and working on our exciting fiftieth issue! See you when I get back!

We are coming up to our 50th issue here at Advanced Photoshop magazine and we are running a number of special features. I am writing to invite you to take part in a ‘just-for-fun’ feature that we are doing called ‘50 covers by 50 artists’ (working title!) where I am asking artists to provide us with an image that they think would work as an Advanced Photoshop cover. We will then be mocking each of those images up into an Advanced Photoshop cover and printing them all inside the magazine. Now, while we have a great number of artists on board already, I’d love to see some work from our readers featured, too.If you would like to contribute to this, then all you have to do is fill in the information below and provide me with an image that you would like to see mocked up into a cover.Name:Location:Occupation:Website:Name of image provided:Why this image would make a good cover (50 words):Images should be 300dpi, CMYK, TIFF or PSD and a minimum size of 15 x 15cm. If you want to upload to our FTP, then please email me for details.You can see our latest cover at www.advancedphotoshop.co.uk for an idea of layout. Email your contributions to julie.easton@imagine-publishing.co.uk with the Subject line as ‘AP 50 cover entry’.The best covers will then be printed in issue 50.Julie 

New issue hits the shelves tomorrow! All the latest and greatest techniques including: The rules of fantasy art; Using photo references in digital paintings; Master the Calculations function; Challenging and inspiring Masterclasses, including: Create an urban photomontage; Add a silver effect to monochrome images; Have fun with stock images; Interview with Marko Djurdjevic; Build a home studio, whatever your budget; Free CD with brushes, vector graphics and more

As I mentioned before, Rosie from Photoshop Creative has been in Las Vegas for Photoshop World. You can read her latest updates on the blog at http://blog.photoshopcreative.co.uk. Check it out!

Photoshop World is now underway in Las Vegas (okay, well not quite at the time of writing as the Vegas is eight hours behind!). Rosie Tanner of Photoshop Creative fame is there representing our Photoshop titles – so if you’re there, keep an eye out for her! We’ll be getting all the show news from her, so watch this space!

It’s so very quiet in our pod at the moment, with Adam taking a week off and leaving me and Stacey to get on with the business of getting the next issue ready for you! We’re busy planning issue 50, which we hope will be pretty special – look out for it at the beginning of November. With Adam off, I’ll be doing my best to get comments on all the great images uploaded to the gallery site this weekend, but it might take a little while to get round them all – you’ve certainly been busy!