Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/12/26/pioneer-spaceship-for-illustration-friday/

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.