Illustration

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

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/19 19:38 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Tutorials, cute character | Comments (0)

Yum! Packed Lunch!

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 what is known as an art challenge website . This means that every week they post a word, and the online artistic community (i.e. everybody) is invited to create an illustration based on that word. This week’s word is “ expired”.

Probably inspired by the famous Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch…

Mr. Praline: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

( more about the sketch on Wikipedia)

… the word expired is associated with the death of small animals in my mind, and my first ideas for illustrations were to do with zombie parrots and hamsters.

But then inspiration struck and I thought, “Why not a Vampire cute little animal!”

Why not indeed, technically vampires are the undead rather than expired, but I think the idea still holds.

So I fired up GIMP (as you probably know, GIMP is the leading open-source competitor to Photoshop) and attached my trusty graphics tablet to one of the USB ports on my lappy.

My first sketch was as usual a little off composition-wise, but that was easy to fix because I had done the sketch on a transparent layer that I added above the background white layer of the image. I simply increased the size of the layer of the sketch until the central part of the image, with the cat, was all that was left showing.

Now the cat is undoubtedly the focus of the image, as competing elements such as the coffin in the foreground have been forced off the edge. I created a second transparent layer and coloured in the cat.

I also coloured in all the other elements of the illustration in the same rough and ready way, using the sketch as a guide and putting each new element on a separate layer. For example the cat’s body, collar, tag, eyes and teeth all get their own layer. With my graphics tablet and the GIMP brush set to a wide radius this is the work of just a few seconds.

When this process of colouring is far enough along it is possible to just delete the layer of the image file with the sketch on, because it isn’t needed any more.

Because the image is an illustration of a vampire it is almost inevitably a night time picture. To make a nice night sky I have put silhouettes of trees on one layer, a blend from orange to invisible on a layer behind that, then a moon, then a duplicate of the moon on a new layer smudged and with the opacity turned down to make it shine, then behind that a layer with stars and behind that a layer of solid dark blue.

Then to add more character to my character I added a new layer to paint shadows onto the cat, and yet another layer to give it eyelids. As the image is becoming more finished I also dropped the png file I have of my signature into GIMP by dragging and dropping, GIMP then did all the hard work of importing it into the image on a separate layer for me, yippee!

Now where into the phase of adding detail and tidying up. Here I have added some bumpiness to the soil, and I’ve tidied up the lower edges of the grave stones in the background of the illustration. This process of tidying up and adding detail to the image could potentially go on for a long, long time, and it really is a matter of taste as to where you draw the line and say, “ This is a finished illustration!”

I hope you like the Vampire Cat.

Step-by-step fantasy illustration, stage two

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/19 00:36 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration | Comments (0)

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 have been working on this illustration in GIMP for quite a few hours now. I have been sketching up a storm on my graphics tablet.

Last time we saw this fantasy illustration the main character was still human. I was making little changes, here I have added some detail to one of the pixies and changed the colour of the magic users cloak to yellow.

The image had been starting to look a little flat to me and I was trying to spice it up. I kept changing little things.

But then I suddenly had the idea, “Why don’t I paint the main character in the illustration as a crocodile!”

With GIMP that’s the easiest thing in the world to try out, you just add a new layer on top of the image and paint in the changes to see if you like them. If you decide that you don’t like the new direction after all, then just delete the new layer, no harm done. I did like the new direction though. I think the picture looks a lot better with a green monster painted in instead of the magician.

I gave all his clothes a more yellow look by painting transparent yellows over the original image on new layers. I also edited out the jar. I think the new green monster at the centre of this picture would have more immediate plans for the pretty little magic creatures he is trying to catch. Yum, yum!

After taking such a radical approach to redesigning the main character of the illustration I decided to be equally radical with the image’s background. I’ve sampled the colours from the original background, but redistributed and opened out the trees. This should give me a bit more room back there to add nice little details.

Huge changes and redesigns to the illustration might not be the most efficient work flow when it comes to creating digital fantasy paintings, but I just can’t help it. If I have an idea for the illustration that I think will look good then it is hard to resist giving it a try.

Needless to say the illustration is still far from complete and there will be more exciting installments about how it is being created to come.

Digital Fantasy Painting with pixies using gimp

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/17 15:16 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials, cute character | Comments (1)

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 so I decided to paint an image with pixies in it. It is going to be called The Pixie Catcher when it is finally done.

For people who were not brought up in the UK being read Enid Blyton stories at bed time, a pixie is a fairy like creature, sometimes thought of as being blue. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about pixies.

All I have decided about the pixies in my illustration so far is that they are blue and have wings and a tail. I’ll be adding more detail to them as work on the illustration progresses.

I started work with the largest and most important character in this cute fantasy illustration, the pixie catcher himself. I simply opened GIMP and created a new image (I chose to make it an .xcf file to be able to use all GIMP’s features and save drafts). Then I immediately created a new layer within the image to sketch on, I prefer sketching on a transparent layer, rather than the white background because then I can colour in underneath the sketch more easily. I like to sketch freehand with no reference material, like photographs or thumbnails, because the image always seems more spontaneous and real to me when little or no planning has gone into it. It does mean that I sometimes have some problems to solve as I go on though, but that just adds to the fun.

I liked the way the sketch was going and added more and more detail to the character, adding pointy ears to make him look more like a fantasy creature.

Next I turned my attention to imagining the sort of fantasy world where this image might be set. I have been imagining a fantasy world which might end up being called Spiral Land. There would of course be a lot of spirals and, as you can see here, even the branches of the trees might be more spiraly than usual. I have turned the layer with the main character off, by clicking on the eye icon, so that I can concentrate on the background.

As you can see in this screen shot of the GIMP interface that in the layers window only the forest sketch and the background are enabled with the eye icon.

I then switched the layer with the main character back on and created a new layer below it to add some colour to him.

I then added a couple of pixies flying away from the main character as fast as their wings can carry them. To make the image cuter I had the idea that the trees would be helping the fairies to escape, so I altered the image to have one of the branches curling around the main character’s hat to try to stop him. It’s quite a subtle change, and I might have to add more branches helping the pixies to make this idea more obvious.

Here I have started to add some shadows to the image, you can see the change best on the character’s face. Shadows are really easy to add in GIMP, and they really bring the image to life. Simply create a new layer above the thing you want to add shadows to. Paint the shadows roughly in a dark colour, but turn down the opacity of the layer, using the slider at the top of the layer window. The lines and areas you paint will transform from solid colour to the merest hint of a shadow at low opacity, or quite heavy shadows at high opacity. You can make the edges of the shadows less sharp with the smudge tool, and when you are happy with the effect just right click on the shadow layer and chose the merge down option to add the shadows to your object.

Apart from a few edits like changing the shape of the hat, adding spirals to the main character’s collar and resizing the image to zoom in more on the scene the only difference between this image and the one before is layer after layer of shadows and a lot of time. Although I have also switched off and deleted the layers with the original sketches on because I don’t really need them any more. Now I’m more painting than drawing, but still using the same GIMP tools and my graphics tablet, the best 60 euros I ever spent.

I’m starting to like this image and I’ll be doing more work on it soon. I’ll post the final image here on the blog as soon as it’s done.

GIMP Tutorial section gets a makeover

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/13 16:11 Posted in GIMP, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

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 it I noticed an ugly problem. When you look at the website on a computer with a wide screen, on an Apple Notebook for example, the title bar is stuck in the left corner and the dividing line below it extends on for an arbitrary number of pixels. It’s really quite untidy, and I’m going to have to fix it.

I’m using Kompozer to create the non-blog part of the site, with all the galleries and tutorials, and it is really quite limited, but I strongly hoped there would be a solution.

This tutorial on using Kompozer to create a site seemed to have the answer. Just put everything in a table that has the precisely attribute and is set to 100%. I quickly gave this a go.

And with a new page, following these instructions it would have been no problem, but this is the main page of my art portfolio website and I have been working on it for a year with more than one web editor, uploading illustrations, moving images and text around and doing a bit of direct poking about in the html as well.

It just wouldn’t work for me for a long time, and then I noticed that deep within the code of the page, its width was being defined. I deleted that line of code and almost everything started working. It only took an hour of trial and error too.

I say almost everything because there was still an annoying white border to the right of the site header. I couldn’t find any way to fix this using the Kompozer WYSIWYG interface, but when I edited the code to copy the same 0 margin value as at left and top, it finally started to look the way I wanted, a solid bar across the top of the screen.

So here is what the illustration site looks like now, oh and there are some nice illustrations to go with my hard won graphic design victory.

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

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/12 17:31 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Tutorials, cute character | Comments (0)

subterranean rabbit picture, GIMP

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 mix up the mood with something more cute.

I decided that although the image would have an underground setting, it would have a cute rabbit as its main character.

So of course step one was to attach my Wacom “ Bamboo Pen” Graphics tablet, I must admit I am slightly in love with this gadget, and it’s great to have it working under Ubuntu at last. I also opened GIMP and started a new image. The first thing I did was add a new transparent layer to the image, and I started sketching on that. It makes it so much easier to colour in when the lines float on top of the picture and you can colour in below. It’s impossible to colour over the lines!

Next I started colouring in the image, I wanted to avoid any trace of the sinister in this image and have the rabbit be extremely cute, so I roughly tried to suggest its shape with a very bright blue. All the different elements of the GIMP image are of course on different layers, and I am using the “save for web” add on to quickly produce these low data thumb nails to illustrate this post.

As I was adding more detail, and colouring in more of the elements of the picture, I decided that the rabbit should actually be reading his fortune, I have no idea why, it just seemed more interesting I guess. So I increased the size of the table in front of the subject of the image and painted in some cards, free hand, like everything else in the image.

I was quite pleased with the way the image was progressing but I had my usual issue of too many dissimilar colours lying on the image like a pizza topping. To solve this problem I painted a layer of solid brown, dark brown, as the top layer of the image. Then I turned the transparency of this layer down until I could see the elements of the image through this top brown layer. It immediately pulled all the different colourful elements together into one unified image.

Then I used the eraser tool to cut holes in this layer for the door and window, and edges that would be caught in the beams of light coming through them. It had a very dramatic effect.

Then I resized the image, I used the scalpel tool from the GIMP toolbox, and darkened only the layer with our card player on, using the brightness contrast tool from the colours menu. I think it already works as an image, after just two, or three hours work, but I’m probably going to be adding finishing touches such as images on the faces of the cards and a picture within the frame hanging on the wall. We’ll see.

blog post about blogs about illustration

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/09 14:48 Posted in Illustration, Review, Website | Comments (0)

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 highest quality stuff, mostly really good commercial vector illustrations on the day I checked it out. Watch out for your bandwidth though, there are a lot of posts right there on the front page and each one is good quality (i.e. big), it’s probably best to check out this resource on your employer’s Internet connection.

Illustration Friday is of course on the list, and anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time will know that I try not to miss their weekly art challenge. I’m really quite pleased with how my Illustration Friday entry for this week turned out.

Next on the list was Illustrophile, which looks intimidatingly professional to me, as though it is by graphic designers for graphic designers. There is some nice illustration here, but I didn’t linger for long.

Illustrationmundo, the next on the list on the other hand says anyone can join, right there on the front page, much more inviting. I must admit I didn’t join though, I couldn’t work out what was in it for me. Would my work appear in the blog, or would I just get an inbox full o’ stuff. I’ll do some more research later and try to find out, or perhaps not, who knows?

Drawn! Was also on the list, but I must admit I find it a little dull, Illustration news foe illustration news’ sake. It’s not as if that much that’s interesting happens in the illustration world. It’s not economics, or politics. But I guess if you are actually in the business…

The next blog on the list Today’s Inspiration looks more like a history blog than an illustration blog to me. It’s about 50s illustrators and illustrations. It didn’t particularly appeal to me, and it is another one where the first page just keeps loading and loading as post after post, each with more than one illustration in, it is added to the bottom of the page.

Zerotoillo didn’t load properly for me, but then I am using Firefox on Ubuntu, so my system is a little nonstandard, but not that non-standard. That said, it was just a few text bars in the wrong place and bad header warning, the blog was perfectly readable, and all the illustrations were there, so that didn’t spoil my enjoyment. And it is an enjoyable blog, with long interviews and posts that give an insight into the author’s life and experiences. There are some very nice illustrations here too.

Lines and Colours was also represented in the list of illustration sites I found, and there are certainly some very nice illustrations there.

Signature Illustrations is a very nice collection, there is a lot of inspiration here and the page loads up really quickly, even though there are hundreds of illustrations on it.

The next one on the list was a nice change, most of the previous links were commercial images but Character Design is more animation and storyboard orientated. It has the sort of illustrations you see at the end of Dream Works movies. There are some really vibrant and amusing illustrations. Monsters and pop-culture stuff. It was my favourite of the list, apart of course from Illustration Friday.

The Little Chimp Society looks really useful, you can post news about what is happening in your illustration career, apparently, if only I was better at getting on with stuff like that.

The commenters on the post left a lot of nice kinks too, like Drawger, with lots of illustrations, and an interesting layout.

Brave, a digital painting for Illustration Friday

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/07 00:05 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Tutorials | Comments (4)

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.

The digital sketch takes shape

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.

More elements are added in GIMP

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).

A GIMP illustration with monsters

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.

A dark woodland image with monsters

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.

A blue Victorian in trouble

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.

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

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/06 22:00 Posted in Graphics Tablet | Comments (0)

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 have to hunt out the CD Rom to reinstall the driver every single time I switched off the computer, but it worked, mostly. But with that computer dead, that wasn’t an option.
I was saved, and reconnected to the information super-highway by a very kind friend. They gave me a laptop that had had its insides wiped after a virus attack, all that was left on it was the Bios, the short program that lives on a chip inside somewhere and tells it how to boot up.
But unfortunately I couldn’t just put XP on this new machine without paying a lot of money.

I did know that there was an alternative that wouldn’t cost any money though, drum roll… Linux… screams of terror.
Linux has a reputation of being a bit tricky, a reputation that you have to be an absolute nerd to get anywhere with it, and as far as my experiences went, this reputation seems to be absolutely deserved.

I installed Puppy Linux, that makes it sound too easy though, what I actually did was trash my computer’s long-suffering hard disk about twenty times trying to make the right partitions before Puppy Linux finally installed.

I installed Puppy Linux, but my cool little Bamboo graphics tablet wouldn’t work, it’s a new one and the drivers have only just been written. I moved from one version of Linux to another, Linux people call the different versions distros, looking for one that contained the drivers that would get my graphics pad working. In the end I tried Puppy Linux, Open Suse, Slitaz, Slax and Mandriva without any luck. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu and everything clicked into place. I found a forum thread where a giant team of people were working on getting these new Wacom Graphics tablets working with Linux, and after following the instructions in this great and easy to follow post my Bamboo Pen tablet simply sprung to life.

I’m so happy I can hardly even think straight.

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

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/28 22:52 Posted in Illustration, Review, Role-playing game, role-playing game | Comments (0)

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 allowing the illustrations to be based on a more and more substantial foundation. Tarazet is really becoming an extensive source of inspiration for any science fiction gamemaster.

I’m really beginning to get a feel for what does and doesn’t happen, and does and doesn’t work in the Tarazet universe, with is a funny thing to be able to admit about a supposedly imaginary space-opera-type fantasy role-playing game setting. And the pdf version of these role-playing game rules can be downloaded here.

It is a rules-light game system that supports a richly imagined universe of adventure, well at least as much richly-imagined universe of adventure as it is possible to fit into a 23 page pdf game’s rule book. It is however growing all the time. As I create pages with illustrations, ideas and text with the Tarazet universe as a setting I just copy and paste it with a few refinements directly into the pdf. I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for this game setting, and that even extends to some ideas for science fiction adventures. It can be a chore coming up with new challenges for your player characters and it’s always good to see that this basic necessity has been addressed to some degree in a rules book.

Cool new GIMP tutorial on Starbright

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/27 21:56 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Technique, Tutorials | Comments (0)

I’ve been meaning to add tutorials to Starbright Illustrations for a long time. I’ve been putting a lot of effort into learning programs like GIMP and Photoshop and trying to get good results, and I thought it would be a good idea to share what I have learned. I wouldn’t say that I’m a power user or a professional or anything, but I have spent some time with these apps, and I have gotten some results that I’m quite happy with from time to time.

So here it is, my first GIMP illustration tutorial, and it is of course a science fiction image.

It took me about three days to create the image and I was exporting images from GIMP at every significant stage using the Save for Web extension.

The tutorial that has appeared on the Starbright site is based on a series of posts about a GIMP illustration project from this blog – that’s right you read it here first – and the blog version, which spans three posts, is still probably the more detailed version.

The image was made with my Wacom Bamboo graphics pad, but it’s a while since I used it. It isn’t supported in the Linux kernel yet and since my Windows machine died that means it just won’t work any more. But I’ve got my eye on the Mandriva forum, and a few other places – whatever Google throws up really – so I’m hopeful that there’ll be a solution, a kernel patch, a driver or something of the sort soon.

It’s the only thing missing from my artistic arsenal though, overall I’m very happy with Linux in general and Mandriva in specific, so expect more tutorials soon, just not for the graphics tablet.