GIMP

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)

Vampire cat illustration made with GIMP

Vampire cat illustration made with GIMP

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

New cleaner look for the Starbright Illustrations scifi art site

By The Illustrator  |  2010/02/24 16:13 Posted in GIMP, Illustration, SEO etc, Spaceships  |  Comments (0)

As I mentioned in my last post, all the science fiction sketches, designs, art, 3D renders and illustrations have always been the most popular element of both the Starbright Illustrations main site and the Starbright Illustrations blog. It seems that now might be a great time to refocus the site towards this sort of work, to make the site more unified and understandable, but hopefully still vibrant, varied and interesting.

As part of this process I’ve been redesigning the site to have a white background, simpler layout and new logo. The first of these new-design pages is taking shape here. I’ creating the pages in Kompozer, and one of the advantages of using such a simple app is that it creates nice simple web pages that download quickly. At lest they should download quickly as long as I keep my eye on the sizes of all the images I’m creating. When I remember I use the Save foe Web extension for GIMP to make sure the illustrations are as small as possible.

Installing it was a bit of an effort with Mandriva Linux however. I remember with the old Windoze machine – before it died – all I had to do was drop the extension into the right GIMP folder. With Linux I had to download extensions to my operating system and type in different lines of code, using Google to look up how to react to the error messages that were spat out in a little black window when the extension repeatedly failed for various esoteric reasons.

But as soon as the new look has spread across the site a little, it’ll be straight back to sketching spaceships and other bits of sci-fi hardware and working these designs into completed illustrations.

A Digital Painting of A Wilderness of Stars, oh and of course, a spaceship.

By The Illustrator  |  2010/01/15 20:19 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, Tutorials  |  Comments (0)

Green spaceship, looks mouldy.

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.

wilderness1

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.

wilderness2

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.

wilderness3

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.

I just saw Avatar in 3D and loved the design, the alien ecosystem and all the concepts.

By The Illustrator  |  2010/01/02 01:51 Posted in Film, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Review  |  Comments (0)

Does it look too cute vin pink?

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.

Brown, frightening?

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.

GIMP Digital Spaceship Painting Tutorial part 3

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/28 19:55 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Spaceships, Technique, Tutorials  |  Comments (0)

It's behind yooou!

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.

pioneer_spaceship10

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.

 

pioneer_spaceship11

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.

pioneer_spaceship12

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.

pioneer_spaceship12a

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.

pioneer_spaceship14

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.

pioneer_spaceship15

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.

pioneer_spaceship16

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.