Graphics Tablet

This spaceship is getting gnarly

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/17 14:48 Posted in 3D, Blender, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, spaceship | Comments (0)

My spaceship illustration is coming on in leaps and bounds, getting more interesting all the time. It has twice as many greebles as the last time we saw it, and of course it was almost completely smooth when I rendered the mesh in Blender.

GIMP step by step Moby-Dick tutorial more detail

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/04 22:05 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

After a quick pause to post my entry for Illustration Friday it’s back to the Moby-Dick painting. I quickly added some spume to the big wave at the centre of the painting and then was about to turn to the whaling boat, when I realised that I don’t really know what a whaling boat looks like.

Thank goodness that all us artists have Google now. To find a nice boat to use as reference I simply had to do a quick Google search. I did the same to remind myself what a whale looks like and to find out what made Moby white. It makes the whole illustration process a lot easier. Here is the page where I found a nice detailed view of the inside of the craft. It’s actually a website for people who build model boats and has a lot more detail in sharper focus than I was able to find anywhere else.

I’m just going to be using it for reference, and I’m pretty comfortable that finding a picture of a boat to use in painting my illustration isn’t cheating. Here I’ve dropped the picture I got from the internet into the GIMP xcf file to make sure I can do it justice.

With the boat in place, and a few alterations made to turn it around to face the danger coming from the background of the illustration, it was time to add some detail to the figures in the boat. At the moment they still look like the match-stick men of an L.S. Lowry painting.

As I’m not entirely sure what the 18 ^th century adventurers I want to put in the picture might look like It’s back to Google.

I found a great bunch of whalers to use as reference. I found them on a blog post where the blogger was boasting of his friend’s performance in the Alaskan Whaler category of the World Beard and Moustache Competition. Based on this photo, I guess the most important accessory to give my crew is an Aron jumper.

I got distracted after working on Ahab for a while and did some work on the eye of the monster whale. I added detail and got it to pop out of the image a bit more. Then I sketched some white lines on the whale.

I did this to give the impression of sheets of water floating down the monster’s hide as it emerges from the depths. To help sell these white squiggles as sheets of water I used the smudge tool to smear them a bit. It’s quite a nice effect.

The picture is really starting to take shape now. Next I decided that the wave needed a bit of detail too. So, going about adding detail to the image in exactly the same way as the stage before, I just drew some lines on the wave in the same colour as the wave’s brightest point.

Then to sell these little touches as natural I used GIMP’s smudge tool to make them a little more complex and smoky looking. I think it looks quite good and gives a good impression as a boat wake.

So now I’m going to keep on adding more and more detail in exactly the same way, until of course I suddenly decide that this illustration is done. I have a feeling that won’t be for a while yet though, I think this image is good for at least another couple of blog posts.

Computer graphics painting, elephant, done with GIMP

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/02 17:49 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration | Comments (0)

It’s Friday, and you should probably know the procedure by now.

Every Friday I visit a site called Illustration Friday which provides a showcase for the work of artists from around the world. Every Friday they post a word which is to be used as inspiration for a piece of illustrative art work.

Once I’ve found out this week’s word I look through some of my old illustrations to see if any of them are related to it or, if none seem to fit the bill, I fire up GIMP and create a new piece of digital art with my graphics tablet.

The word this week was “ dip” and I immediately thought of a picture I had painted in GIMP of an elephant dipping his front feet into a pool as he looked at his picture reflected in the surface.

It’s a very dark, atmospheric illustration with a pronounced use of chiaroscuro.

I’m a big fan of this artistic technique, probably because my earliest influences were the black and white ink illustrations of primitive British science-fiction comic books like 2000ad, Starlord and Tornado. Starlord was my favourite and I was quite upset to see it fail and be gobbled up by the inferior 2000ad. An early run in with the triumph of the lowest common denominator, even within a niche market like sci-fi comic books.

Anyway I hope you like this week’s image for Illustration Friday, if you like it there are more illustrations here at the blog (take a look at the menu to the left), and also on the main illustration gallery and GIMP tutorial site.

paint ebook cover image with GIMP, tutorial pt 2

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/01 20:54 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

Here is stage two of the illustration that will eventually be the book-cover image, you can see stage one, the initial sketch, in the original post. The main subject of the illustration is really starting to take shape, but a lot of work still needs to go into Ahab and his crew.

To start turning my scan of my initial sketch into an illustration I opened gimp and made a new document of the dimensions I wanted. Then I just dragged and dropped the jpeg image of the scan into the new gimp document. I then resized it to cover the whole image and I was ready to go, time to plug the graphics tablet into the USB port. On top of the scan of the initial illustration I added four or five large areas of colour to the image.

The whale is one solid block of colour on a separate layer, and so is the wave, boat, flippers etc. You can see the first few layers of the image in the screen grab below, but of course I’ll be creating an awful lot more layers than these few. The more layers you have the more control over your picture you have.

You can see that I have switched some of the layers off in the image above (the eye icons are gone). I did so that I could work on other elements without the whale for example getting in the way.

Just a few more details have been added here. You can see the clouds have been painted very roughly into the background and I’ve just started to make them more cloudy with the smudge tool. I’ve also given ol’ Moby some teeth.

The distinctive white colour of the mythical beast from this illustration comes from barnacles. I did a bit of research and it turns out that our creature from the depths was not an albino. This image is right at the start of the process of adding this colouration.

After twenty minutes of repeatedly jabbing the graphics tablet with the stylus the look of the main character is starting to take shape. It still looks a little like the measles though so I’m not going to be able to close GIMP for the day just yet.

I added a big shadow on top of the layer of the illustration with the colouration and then finally added a layer of patchy white underneath that layer to produce first a bumpy but imposing effect and then a much smoother and more frightening creature. The star of the this book, although most people probably read Moby-Dick as an ebook these days, and there’s no reason why an illustration like this cant be its digital cover.

digital painting art for open-source book covers

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/01 11:18 Posted in Graphics Tablet, Illustration | Comments (0)

Digital painting illustrations for classic out-of-copyright books.

I was surfing the Internet looking for outlets for the artistic talent on display at Starbright illustrations, and as I was clicking around I found the websites of a few mainstream illustration agents, such as The Artworks here, and I noticed an interesting thing. These mainstream sites didn’t feature a lot of illustrations of robots, spaceships or monsters. It seems that if I am going to interest illustration agents in representing my work I’m going to have to include some more mainstream subject matter.

A subject that did seem to turn up repeatedly in the portfolios of the artists that are represented is book covers. I saw illustrations for a few modern interesting books and I thought why don’t I include book cover art in my portfolio?

It seems like a really good idea, but there is a problem, I’ve never actually been commissioned to produce cover art for a book.

But then of course I came up with the solution, if I hadn’t I’d hardly be writing this post. I’ve often raided the fantastic Gutenburg site for free ebooks to read, and these books could also be a very useful source of inspiration for my illustrations. Producing art for the covers of classics by the great authors of the English language would be a pleasure and it would also go a long way to diversifying my portfolio and making it more accessible to the non nerdy comic book fan. As you can see from the sketch accompanying this post my first project will be Moby-Dick, and I’ll be posting my progress as usual while the illustration evolves and gradually moves towards completion.

digital GIMP art image with a graphics tablet

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/29 23:11 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

Today I am painting a scene that is inspired by the word rescue*. Actually I started painting the scene yesterday, and there might still be some little touches to add to the illustration before it’s done, but enough of that – back to work.

Rescue of course requires a dangerous situation and someone in danger, and naturally someone to get them out of it. In my illustration I decided that the brave heroic figure of the image would be a lion, and the creature in danger would be a monkey. I later changed my mind and decided that the foreground figure of the picture would be an elephant instead. But that’s the beauty of GIMP, or any other image manipulation software that you might like (I know you are all thinking it so I’ll just say it, some poor misguided people even use Photoshop for this sort of thing, no matter the price and the bloat). Whatever application you use, if you put each element of the image on a different layer you can just delete the layer and replace it with very little trouble – replacing your monkey with an elephant for example.

Here is the original sketch for this illustration, and as always I didn’t do any preliminary sketches or look for any reference material, I just jammed my graphics tablet into the USB port fired up GIMP and got going. The composition of the illustration was a little tricky but once I had put the boat on a nice big wave in the background there was plenty of room in the foreground of the image for action.

As you can see in the above screen grab I try not to touch the background and so I put every different element of an illustration on a separate layer. Here the sketch is on a transparent layer – denoted by grey checks – hovering above the background layer.

The next step is a simple and fun series of colouring in. The layers with the different colours on are all separate, and if each layer is put below the layer with the sketch on it’s a lot harder to go over the lines.

Next come the stage where I add detail by overlaying layer after layer of semitransparent black over the bare colours and moving them about and mixing them with the smudge tool. Then I sample the original colour and lighten it a bit by selecting the foreground colour at the bottom of the tool box. I paint this on top at full opacity – on it’s own layer of course, you can never have too many layers – and you have highlights.

The monkey looked too much like a badly drawn human so it had to go, but what to replace it with. I decided that an elephant would be quite funny, because there is no way that the skinny lion in the boat is going to be strong enough to pull the elephant out of the water, even if the boat was big enough for it to sit in without it sinking.

The elephant gets a little more detail with the trusty layers of black and smudge then highlight method I mentioned earlier and the image is getting a lot closer to being a completed digital painting.

*as usual my inspiration word came from Illustration Friday, and I’ll be posting the illustration there as soon as it’s done.

fantasy GIMP illustration of a dragon

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/23 22:00 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration | Comments (0)

Today I’ve been painting dragons. Specifically a forest dragon. It’s a very impressionistic illustrative picture, very painterly, but it was entirely created with GIMP – and of course my trusty graphics tablet. I know I sing the praises of my Bamboo graphics tablet every post, but it really is great and compared to most other new graphics tablets, it’s super cheap.

Anyway this forest dragon is dozing comfortably on a small pile of treasure deep in the darkest corner of a forgotten wood. I started sketching it very simply.

There really isn’t much going on in this sketch, I was exclusively interested in the composition and decided that I would be adding detail as I went, and I think that approach worked quite well. It was certainly quick.

The next step was – as always – to add an area of colour to represent each major element of the picture. Two areas of green, one of brown and one of yellow in this image represent respectively the foreground, the dragon, the trees and the dragon’s eye. Each area of colour is created on a separate layer of the GIMP file.

Next I decided to add some shafts of sunlight to the picture. Even without having to use a graphics tablet, I can’t draw a straight line, well not sun-beam straight anyway, but luckily if you paint a dot then hold down the shift key GIMP will work out a straight line for you.

Then I pushed the layer with the sun beams on further back down the stack of layers and turned down the transparency. It was quite a good effect in the end, I think.

The poor forest dragon in the illustration was looking a bit cramped so I decided to open up the composition of the image a little bit. I did it by creating a new bigger image file and dropping the old file in.

I then added a pile of gold to make the dragon more comfortable, they prefer to lie on gold even than soft forest grass. I also toyed with the idea of adding a thief coming to take a handful of the gold away.

I thought that maybe the colour palette was a little limited, almost exclusively made up of different shades of green, so next I made the dragon a lot more colourful and also made the treasure thief in the foreground of the illustration quite colourful too.

In the end of course I decided against the second character for the illustration, and I toned down the colours again too. This picture isn’t quite ready to join the hall of fame on the gallery page of my website but I am tempted to keep working on it and take it that extra stage.

Who knows… watch this space.

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

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/19 19:38 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | 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 (1)

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 | 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.