Author Archives: The Illustrator

I’m the talented illustrator behind this illustration blog. It is the blog on my Starbright Illustration site and it’s a lot of fun – oh and of course there is a lot of illustration.

I’m a UK citizen (although non-resident) and I’m living in Austria right now – my German is getting better and better. I make my living mostly through teaching, translation and, of course, my online illustration related stuff.

Vampire Cat illustration, with GIMP step-by-step tutorial

Although I am far from finished with my troublesome Pixie Catcher fantasy illustration, I’m going to put it on hold for a day because it is Illustration Friday time again. As regular readers of this blog will know – and yes this blog does seem to have regular readers – Illustration Friday is [...]

Step-by-step fantasy illustration, stage two

Hello again from the illustrator’s blog. The illustration I’ve been most recently working on has suddenly gone off in a completely new direction. As you can see it is still a very much fantasy orientated illustration, but the evil magician who was trying to catch the pixies has changed into a crocodile. I [...]

Digital Fantasy Painting with pixies using gimp

I’m working on another digital painting right now, as usual, with GIMP and my Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet. I have spent a couple of evenings on it, something like eight hours in all, and it looks about half done to me. I am still trying desperately to take my images in a cuter direction, and [...]

GIMP Tutorial section gets a makeover

I’ve been working on the tutorials section – including GIMP, Photoshop, etc – at my Illustrations website. It’s going to be a great page when it’s done, with link after link to step-by-step tutorials telling how to paint and render all kinds of images, from sc-fi to children’s book.

But as I was editing [...]

Digital painting of a rabbit down a hole, in GIMP, step by step

Illustration Friday time has once more rolled around and this time the art challenge site has set the word “subterranean” as our source of inspiration. I immediately thought of a space underground, but at the same time, I am conscious that my images of late have all tended towards the creepy, and I wanted to [...]

blog post about blogs about illustration

I’m investigating other illustrators blogs right now and this post on escape from illustration island was a big help in finding quality blogs to check out. It’s probably just because it’s an alphabetical listing, but Ape on the moon was the first blog that they listed. It’s an absolute treasure trove of the [...]

Brave, a digital painting for Illustration Friday

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 [...]

Fixed, I got my new Wacom Bamboo Pen, 056a 00d4, CTL 460 working, in Ubuntu.

It has been a long, terrible and unhappy time with my beautiful friendly little graphics tablet refusing to work, and it’s great to have it back.
My problems all started when my Windows machine died.
My graphics tablet, of course, has a Windows driver that came with it on a disk. It wasn’t perfect and I would [...]

Tarazet the role-playing game, back as free pdf download

Tarazet the Role-playing Game is back as a free pdf download. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives me to have this game back under development. Every illustration I produce of a spaceship or monster is just more inspiration that gets fed back into the role-playing game background, enriching it, and in the process [...]

New spaceship design gallery, and some SEO tips

This spaceship design is an example of the sort of spaceship that might be used by characters in a science fiction role-playing game when they want to avoid being seen as they go about their adventures.
It’s a good example of the sort of science-fiction illustrations I’ve been doing recently, illustrations more orientated towards role-playing games [...]