Starbright Illustrations

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/03/07/brave-a-digital-painting-for-illustration-friday/

My, what big teeth you have!

OK, it was only last week that I was saying that all my future pictures for Illustration Friday would be exclusively spaceship based. It turns out that I couldn’t keep it up for even a month.
This weeks illustration, or the beginnings of it is a strange Victorian fantasy.

My graphics tablet is working again thanks to a switch to Ubuntu and following instructions in a forum thread. Ubuntu really is a lot easier to use than the majority of Linux distributions, and it’s a great pleasure to be using my graphics tablet to do illustrations again. As usual I started by opening GIMP and doing a very rough sketch of my idea for the illustration.

Then I added colours to the sketch to produce a background. So far there aren’t too many layers, just the foreground of the image (the trees), the midground and the background (the sky).

Once I was happy with the way the scenery in my digital painting was beginning to look I added a new layer between the midground and the foreground trees, and I sketched my protagonist on it. He’s a pleasant blue-skinned Victorian creature. Then I added a layer right at the front and sketched a couple of monsters, these are the reason that my central character must be brave.

I then went back to the background levels and added more detail and made them darker, secure in the knowledge that nothing I did would effect the interesting layers with the monsters and protagonist. The changes made the image a lot darker and more atmospheric.

After working some more on the central character, here is where I am with the illustration, and as always I’m in a bit of a dilemma. Should I add a lot more detail to the image, should I sign it, is it just a bit of fun for Illustration Friday, or does it have the makings of a really good finished illustration? I have a feeling that this one has real legs, I could run and run with it, refining the monsters, looking up architectural reference for the houses of the village in the illustration, looking up reference for the digital painting of the strange blue Victorian creature’s coat.

I’m very much enjoying creating this illustration and I’m looking forward to spending a few more nights working on it. I always feel a little like Bob Ross as I give these blow-by-blow accounts of how my paintings are created.