There isn't a Studio Artist book, but there's a ton of online information available on using the program. Plus you can always ask about how to do something specific on the user forum, and get replies from Synthetik as well as other users.

You mentioned you were interested in mosaic effects based on movie brushes.

Here's a tip on how to make a movie brush.

This tutorial group post is a good entry point into all kinds of online information on working with movie brushes to build photo mosaic effects. The first reply post has all of the links to other articles.

Studio Artist is sold as downloadable software. That way you always get the latest update release (not true with boxed software), and it's easy for us to provide additional updates to you in the future as they become available.

morales: here is the main paint-preset (it's an old 3.5 preset, this should also working in 4), tip: use a black canvas when starting your painting

MAX2009_GermanAngstMacher1.zip

Thanks for the comment - I have a bit more work to do on one or two of them yet but thought I would go ahead and post to see what the feedback is like.

I do like this one a bit myself. I took another painting I've been working on and warped it to achieve this canvas. The challenge was to get an asymmetrical composition from the warping engine built into SA so that it wouldn't look too processed.

I tweaked the saturation this morning and am adding some hand applied "embellishments and textures. Nothing really different just subtle enhancements. I also need to apply some sharpening overall. In a day or two I'll post the revision. Glad you like!

Thanks for the comment. I was shooting for an impasto/stucco kind of texture and think it got pretty close. I find textures are kind of difficult in the digital world - at least natural looking ones. Studio Artist seems to have the best brushes for creating textures, they seem to be more organic "out of the box". Painter and PS appear more synthetic to my eyes. I do wish John would work on the interface though! Otherwise a great app.