Every week I go to The Illustration Art challeng website to get inspiration for a digital painting. This week the word on Illustration Friday is “Wilderness”, and me being the science fiction, space ship obsessed nerd that I am, the first idea that jumped to mind was “A Wilderness of Stars”; but where had I heard this evocative phrase before. I started Googling and found …

A Wilderness of Stars by William F Nolan

It seems it was a the title of a collection of science fiction stories, which included a work by the writer of that sci-fi classic Logan’s Run – man, you can find anything out on Google. That would fit for where I had heard the phrase, if it was the title of a science fiction book that might have been hanging about in second-hand stores in the 70s then the title could easily have lodged itself in my subconscious round about then.

I wasn’t satisfied with my Googling though. I wondered if a third rate hack science fiction writer could really have come up with a phrase like this. A phrase that is hard to forget once you hear it. It turned out that he didn’t, the phrase is part of a quote by Mark Twain.

“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God – man – the world – the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars – a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space – and you!”

If Twain got it from somewhere even earlier then I didn’t find out by just Googling. Anyway it seems to me to be perfect inspiration for a digital painting of a spaceship against a backdrop of the wilderness of stars. So I fired up GIMP and attached my drawing tablet to the USB port for some painting.

I started by sketching out the shape of a spaceship freehand using GIMP and my Bamboo graphics tablet. Sketching out these virtual paintings this way, is becoming surprisingly easy and intuitive after a couple of months of practice.

Next I chose a colour for the spaceship and added it to a new layer underneath the frame. I’m not sure green was a good choice for the colour scheme of the image, and luckily we are still early enough in the digital picture painting process to easily  be able to change it to something better.

I added some bright blue to a layer below the spaceship, then duplicated it and turned the transparency down on the two layers. Then I smudged the layers and it looks as though radioactive fire is shooting out of the spacecraft’s engines. Excellent.

This spaceship painting is still at a very early and developmental stage, be sure and pop back to the blog to see this abstract shape turn into a beautifully realised cruiser of the wilderness of stars.

OK, so I just watched Avatar and I’m not going to even fight the influence this is going to be having on my sketches for the foreseeable future.

It’s a great movie and I absolutely loved it. It has attracted some criticism for a certain simplicity in the story, but I think that’s missing the point. The alien planet and ecosystem is so richly imagined and contains such detail, that if a more complex or ambivalent story were attached to it the whole movie might have become too complex. And visually the movie is fantastic. For an old-school nerd like me it was great to see the 2001-like spaceship in the opening shots, and although a certain suspension of disbelief is required for the floating mountains, I think it’s worth it for the sheer majesty of the images.

Here is an earlier version of the illustration with a lot less detail. Even in this early version the influences from Avatar should be obvious to anyone who has seen the movie.

Just like in the movie there are two wings on the flying lizard. There is a huge gas giant in the background blocking out most of the horizon and the colour scheme of the creature is very lurid. There are of course a lot of differences too. Avatar took 12 years and a quarter of a billion dollars to create, while my image has had about four hours work done on it so far, and as I’m working in GIMP, the cost is just about zero.

I also had the great idea of opening FarmVille on my other computer and catching up with some of my chores while I’m sketching away on the graphics tablet on the first computer. It’s a great way to do some multitasking.

Last time we saw this image it looked like this. It’s the very first design sketch with only the most important elements, placed in the guide psd provided by CreateSpace, and a few colours. I have put each element on a separate layer. The cat’s on one layer and the sky on another, and I’m ready to go. And I can already see the first problem with the composition, the title is getting a bit lost.

To make the title easier to read I shrank the mirror using Photoshop’s free transform, so that the title doesn’t have to be written over it. Having the mirror on a separate layer makes shrinking and moving it a whole lot easier. I also darkened the title by painting over the typed text. This gave the text a darker more hand painted and interesting look. I painted each letter on a separate layer to give me the option of shrinking, growing, twisting and moving them to make the text in the digital painting even more organic and interesting.

The landscape behind the cat was looking a little empty so I added some grass, trees and mountains to the midground and background of the image. I also worked a little on the cat to make it a little smoother and less sketchy. There is a long way to go with the cat, but every little helps.

Next I sketched in some clouds very roughly with the graphics pad stylus – I’m doing pretty much everything on this image using just Photoshop and my inexpensive little Bamboo fun graphics tablet. To make these white hatched lines look more like clouds I just poked at them a little bit with the smudge tool. It’s quite effective, in this detail from the illustration the left of the cloud is smudged and the right is still scratchy white hatching lines created with the graphics tablet.

Next I worked on the trees. I created a layer beneath the initial sketches and added colour to make the trees a little more real looking. I also did some more work on the cat. The cat is going to be the focus of this image and little by little I’m going to be doing dabs of work on it until it’s done. This latest stage of the illustration took a couple of hours and I’m going to be coming back for a few more hours work on it real soon.

Hold the front page! I just found the coolest website, and I’m not talking about FarmVille, although that is pretty cool. No, I’m talking about CreateSpace: Self-Publish and Distribute Your Books, Video and Music On-Demand which is an Amazon.com website.

I’ve been painting my digital illustrations and writing my stories for some time now; sometimes science fiction, sometimes children’s picture books, but always with only my blog here at Starbright as a creative outlet. But CreateSpace seems like it might be an easy, low-maintenance way to get really published, on paper, in a good old-fashioned book. They provide a free ISBN number, they provide templates to download and follow when creating your book and there is a forum of lovely like-minded creative types right there on the site for support.

So today has been a lot of fun, I created an account with CreateSpace, for free, and downloaded a template so I could get going and make the cover for “I Am Spiralcat”, a children’s picture book. Me and my girlfriend have had the idea for this children’s picture book for some time, and it has come close to being published a couple of times, but this seems the perfect way to take control of the project ourselves.

There have been some frustrations too today though. CreateSpace provide a nice template in png format for GIMP or psd format for Photoshop, and anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time will be able to predict that my first instinct was to use GIMP to create my image. Unfortunately GIMP just wasn’t up to it. It was verrry verrry slowwww indeed. I tried as hard as I could, because I do love it so, but whatever I did, it just couldn’t handle the huge, high-resolution image that you have to create. Just changing the transparency of a layer took ten minutes, and when I messed with the preferences to give GIMP more RAM and turned off all the thumbnails it took, nine minutes to calculate the same transparency change. So I was forced to use Photoshop CS3.

Photoshop has behaved impeccably and hardly seems to notice the hugely inflated size of the file, the pen on my graphics tablet lags a bit sometimes and the file takes a few seconds longer than normal to save, but that’s about it. Apparently the new version of GIMP with it’s non destructive editing and other such technical marvels will be able to compete, but until then I’ll be using Photoshop to create my children’s picture book for CreateSpace and Amazon, and GIMP only for smaller low res images for the website.

I’ll be posting my progress with the illustrations for the book, with all their unique challenges and fun features, and of course I’ll be digital painting the odd spaceship in GIMP from time to time too.

This might be the third part of this GIMP digital painting tutorial, but it’s actually a good place to join. If you have been following this process from part 1 then, as you can see from the main image, a lot of progress has already been made since the start of this spaceship painting process, and even since part two of this look at the creation of a science fiction illustration.

When we last saw the illustration it looked like the image on the left. The monster was still an abstract shape and the new improved space explorer had just been hashed in.

I was still a little unhappy with the look of the spaceman however, he looked a little too much like a superhero with bulging muscles.

So after a little more work our intrepid explorer now looks a little thinner and more vulnerable. His spacesuit is the same colour – basically – as the spaceship hovering over the scene in the background and that pretty much ties him to it, I think. But it is a little boring, and there is almost the danger that he might be mistaken for some kind of expendable exploration droid. I’m going to have to be careful to do everything I can to keep him looking human.

Here in this next image we can see that with a bright high-vis orange vest on his exploration/environment suit and some bright highlights he is looking a lot more interesting.

It’s still possible to mistake him for a robot though and he’s going to need a lot more work before he’s done, but right now the monster in the background is crying out for attention.

The monster is the focus of what we are doing in the next couple of images. Here in this first image I have started building layer after layer of detail onto the monster. When I’m happy with a particular look, or the number of layers has just gotten a little unmanageable I’ll blend the layers down, repeatedly using the GIMP function of that name, until there’s just one monster layer again, and then start over.

Here this process continues with ever more detailed layers of light and shade being added to the monster using my Wacom drawing tablet. It’s starting to look less like a smooth and ugly frog, and more like a frightening crocodile thing that could really do some damage to an unsuspecting planetary explorer. I’ve added more detail to the foreground jungle too.

Now the foreground jungle is casting a shadow on the monster. I created the shadow by adding a new layer, painting a black shadow on the monster, turning the transparency of the shadow down to something like 30% and then moving it about with the smudge tool (looks like a finger) to soften it. I was really quite happy with the shadow, it seems to turn the monster from a flat shape into a real 3D creature.

The last touch – for now – was to work on the transparent data screen in the explorer’s hand. Using the shift button to make straight lines and tidy it up a bit. I hope it’s telling him to look out behind him!

The image has come a long way during the work, with 7 different jpegs showing different stages of the progress in this post alone, but there’s still a long way to go. When it is finally complete I’m thinking of putting all the images of the different stages of completion together into an animation. It might end up being quite a long animation.

I love forums, whenever you have an IT or computer problem and go Googling for the answer it always seems to come from the kind people who hang out in forums. I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out in GIMP lately and I’ve been looking for a forum to post my art and find answers to my problems, and here it is. GIMPER.NET – The GIMP Community – Index page. There does seem to be one big problem though. I don’t see any signature links, and when I created one and previewed it – it looked dead. If the site doesn’t allow signature links, then why should anyone create content for them?

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to keep looking for a proper GIMP forum who don’t mind the people who create the content for them linking away to their own site.

In the mean time I’ve been working on my latest spaceship illustration. When we last saw it, it looked like the image to the left, but it has gone through quite a lot of development since then and as a tutorial-like guide I’ll post some of the iterations here.

First I darkened the spaceman character in the foreground of the image. In this illustration the spaceship is to be an imposing presence, but despite that still a backdrop to the foreground action.

Then I moved the spaceship to the top of the layers pile so that I could work on it without being disturbed by the elements of the image that would otherwise overlap it – a really good reason to keep each element of the illustration on it’s own layer. I added windows, greebles and other details until I was happy with it, for now, and then mixed all the spaceship layers together into one spaceship layer and moved it back down to it’s proper place in the stack.

When the spaceship is in its proper place, it is behind a translucent white layer which nicely simulates the effect of seeing something far away through a lot of intervening atmosphere – the colours fade. I darkened the jungle foliage in the background of the image and worked into it to make a little more detail. I also muted the colours of the monster in the image – which is still a quite abstract shape – because it is going to be lowering in the shadows in the completed picture, if everything goes according to plan.

With only a few light-colour trees in the foreground the brave interplanetary adventurer looked as though he was in the open, so I deleted them and blocked in a shape to better represent the jungle clearing feel that I was originally going for in this digital painting. The adventurer was beginning to look a little lost too, so as you can see in the image to the left, I resized him.

And here we have the current state of play with this illustration. The space adventurer wasn’t looking heroic enough, and it seemed strange that he was looking through binoculars into this dense alien jungle where visibility can’t be more than a few meters, so I’ve bitten the bullet and started to completely redesign him.

You can see the very first stages of this image here, and I’ll be posting updates as I make more progress in bringing this digital painting home, so far using GIMP exclusively.

I was very pleased to see that this week’s word on Illustration Friday is Pioneer. I draw a lot of spaceships with GIMP, and design a lot of 3D spaceships too, with Blender, and pioneering is one of the coolest tasks a spaceship can be put to – to boldly go and all that.

For this Illustration Friday image I have added a very literal human pioneer in the foreground of the picture, as well as the pioneer spaceship in the background. There is a hideous alien monster lurking in the bushes too, about to make the astronaut pay for his curiosity with his life, or at the very least scare the living daylights out of him.

This illustration is perhaps not the finished image just yet – I’m thinking there may be some more mileage in it. It has some of the sketchy guidelines of the image which I produced in GIMP with my graphics tablet, and some of the colours of the finished image blocked in too, again in GIMP. I’m thinking of it more as a concept sketch for an electronic painting.

It has already gone through a couple of stages before being considered a finished concept sketch, with colours and shapes being added over several layers. I have saved the illustration in the native GIMP format as well as these jpegs so that it will be very easy to go back to it and bring it from the concept sketch it is now to the completed virtual painting that I think I can see lurking within.

To get it to a more polished and detailed state will require a load more foliage in the jungle, and greebles on the spaceship. The jungle foreground should be darker and the spaceship, planets and sky background should probably be even lighter.

The choice of an alien jungle for the setting of the image is of course explained by the fact that I’ve just seen Avatar, and I loved it. I also got a book of the concept images for the movie, which I’m currently leafing through, and it is interesting to see how many of the design and visualisation images for this sci-fi extravaganza were obviously put together on a computer without harming a single sheet of real, honest A4 paper.

I’m painting a spaceship, in GIMP, and you can look over my shoulder and see how it’s done if you like. When it’s finally done I might even add it to my User account | gimp gallery. I just found this gallery on the Internet today and I’m having a look around to see if I like it.

So to start with I got hold of a grainy old free and open source NASA image of a nebula. It’s a bit flat, low resolution and it has some creases on it where more than one photo was stitched together by NASA to produce the final image, but through the magic of GIMP I’m sure we can get it looking pretty good.

Next I added a layer above the background so that I could start drawing a basic spaceship shape without disturbing the original background  image of the nebula.

I started sketching a vague outline in white so that it would show up nicely, and a concept for the spaceship started to form. I thought that with such a beautiful backdrop the brave adventurers aboard the spaceship would like to be able to get a good look outside, so I added, not one, but two observation decks to the top of my design.

Then I just kept going, adding shapes to the spaceship’s hull.

I also worked on the starscape. Adding layers of black to the darker areas and turning down the opacity so the structure can still be seen. I did the same to the nebula, adding washes of pink and orange at half transparency to take away some grainyness without destroying all the structure.

Now it was time to add the greebles. This is a process of doodling in details, like airlocks, windows and other less identifiable hatches, wires, pipes and plates to the surface of the spaceship.

This was all done freehand with some quite rough edged shapes being sketched in on the graphics tablet.

The final step – for now – was to make these greebles more regular by going over them one more time, but this time holding down the shift key quite often to turn use only straight lines drawn between two points. I cropped the picture down to make the spaceship bigger, and I was done.

Energised by yesterday’s t-shirt sale I went back to RedBubble with the intention of totally spring cleaning my online shop there. When I got to the site I discovered a new feature that they are calling BubbleSites. It is a nice looking page that you can set up to act as the shopping cart for people to buy t-shirts of the images they like from your own website.

So of course I lost no time in setting one up for Starbright Illustrations. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Stabright Ts. And the first image I uploaded was the Alien DJ, one of the first designs I ever did for a t-shirt, which has been hanging around on my hard drive – and online – for some time now.

I’m also going to be producing images specially for this new part of the site, featuring prominently cute characters and other t-shirt friendly art.

So I opened GIMP and sketched an image which I called “Happy Rhino”, a bright pink rhino with a big cheese eating smile on his face. I was very happy with it, and I saved it in the required png format. But when I uploaded it the t-shirt image on the gallery site looked a little paler than the original. It looked kind of bleached out. Here take a look…

And the Alien DJ colours look a little muted as well. So the question is, why?

I popped open the RedBubble advice page on how to make a great looking t-shirt to find out.

And in the first couple of paragraphs the page advises,

PNG files only deal with colours in RGB but our printers print your tees in CMYK so the best way to get the most out of your design is to create the image in CMYK and convert it to RGB before you save your document. Depending on what graphics software you are using, this should be easy to change. In both Photoshop and Gimp you will find these settings under image > mode.

Hmm, perhaps that was what I was doing wrong. I went back to GIMP to see what I could do about it, but I couldn’t find a CMYK option and every change I attempted on the huge png file took so long I just wanted to give up, and crawl away and die.

I’ll probably try again in a few days though, once one of these problems gets under my skin I just can’t rest until it’s solved. Oh well.