Graphics Tablet

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.

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!

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.

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.

Love Birds Valentine Vector Image with Inkscape

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/15 22:00 Posted in Graphics Tablet | Comments (0)

This image is called Love Birds, and it is, of course, in honour of Valentine’s Day. I’m focusing on producing images in Inkscape right now. Since the death of my XP laptop and my consequent inability to use my new Bamboo graphics tablet – Linux just doesn’t like it (even my brand spanking new Mandriva install from a disk on the cover of a magazine – I have been forced to shift my attentions from free-hand drawings in Gimp to much more mannered illustrations where composition and mood is a very important element.

So with my graphics tablet off line for the foreseeable future, how was I going to get a sketch from my brain to the screen. I started by spending a few hours with a cheap pad from a supermarket and an expensive 0.5mm pencil to create the composition and shading for the image. Then when I was happy with the composition I had created I scanned it in. Then I fired up Inkscape and imported the jpeg that I had created with a scanner.

With the scan now in Inkscape I resized it to entirely fill the background layer of the page.

I decided to start tracing the smaller objects that would be nearer the front of the image first. It isn’t easy to see what you are doing if you start by tracing the larger elements of the image. If you trace out the sky first, then it’s hard to see where to put the birds. This may seem blindingly obvious, but it’s the opposite of the way I was used to working with a graphics tablet and Gimp or Photoshop.

In Gimp I would first drench the image in colour and then start making marks with the graphics tablet to turn that into a completed image.

One of the things I like about Inkscape is the control you have over the outlines of shapes and how they are shaded. It is very hard to make a picture from these simple – relatively – shapes just using your imagination on an empty screen, but when you have a sketch scanned in the power of Inkscape really starts to become apparent.

I’m almost glad tha waiting for some kind Linux nerd to crack the Wacom driver has forced me to take a break from all the graphics tablet work I was doing. It’s forced me to really engage with Inkscape and discover how powerful, and fun it is.

On Mandravia now but my Wacom Bamboo CTL 460 won’t work

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/07 22:20 Posted in Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Other Systems, problems | Comments (0)

I have been off line for quite a while now , something like three weeks actually – an eternity for me. But where on Earth have I been? Have I been working on lots of new illustrations?

Erm, well, no.

My absence has been hardware related, oh and my translation “day job” got in the way too, but mostly – like I said – hardware related. What happened was that my chunky, robust, seemed-like-it-would-live-forever laptop died.

Well, just the screen died, but that was enough to take it from being the centre of my world (sad, I know), to a medium-sized lump of plastic with some exotic metals inside that makes a noise when you plug it in.

There was another XP machine here at base camp, a seven-year-old one, and wouldn’t you know it. It picked almost the very same day to finally give up the ghost too. It had had mobo troubles for a long time, and in the end it gave in to its terminal mobo blues. So, on the same day, both Windoze machines died.

But I had another computer, thanks to a donation from a generous friend who lent it to me when it got full of viruses and needed its OS wiped. I had been playing with Linux on that machine. More than just playing, I had been getting quite enthusiastic. I had added Puppy Linux after downloading it and putting it on the machine via a USB stick.

But I broke that one too – this time “just” a software issue though. The laptop doesn’t have a battery, well it does but it can only store 2.8% of the power it should. Without the power cable in, this brave lappy tries its best, but only manages to stay awake long enough to boot up. If it had to boot up a monster like Windows it wouldn’t even get that done.

So I booted it up to post about my troubles with the other two laptops and, you guessed it – I’d forgotten to put the power cable in, and it made a “poop” noise and died while I was connecting to the Internet. No problem, I thought, I attached the cable, booted up again, but the Internet dialler program had been broken by the unexpected power out while it was loading. Aaargh! With the other two computers pushing up daisies, that meant my only access to the web was gone!

Without web access I couldn’t download a fresh Puppy Linux to put on the USB and start again either, so I went to the newsagent to buy a magazine with an operating system. First I made a quirky choice, and paid money for a magazine with the new Google Chromium OS. But of course that turned out not to be an operating system at all, just a front end for their web tools. So back to the newsagents.

I then bought a cool magazine that had two double-sided DVDs, with bootable versions of four different flavours of Linux, called respectively, Kubuntu, OPENsuse, Knopix and Mandravia. First I tried Kubuntu. It didn’t do much of anything at all. It just froze at the boot screen. Apparently this is a known issue. Ubuntu-related OSs just won’t boot on some machines. Next I tried Mandravia, with a KDEdesktop (on boot up you can choose between KDE and Gnome desktops). It booted but it was so slow it would take 20 mins to open a document. So next I put OPENsuse on the laptop – and this time I chose the Gnome desktop (a good choice as it turns out, KDE seems to big and resource hungry for this five-year-old laptop). OPENsuse booted up nicely, and behaved itself well, it connected me to the Internet too. I used it for our latest translation job and it was quicker and more pleasurable to use than XP had been. But there was one issue.

I couldn’t get my super-new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet (a CTL 460) to work. It’s one of the real new ones, and although some people have gotten it to work, it just isn’t really supported in Linux, yet. I’ve been trying and trying, and I replaced OPENsuse with Mandravia (this time I chose the Gnome option so that it would work) on the off chance that it was supported. Which is where I am now. Quite happy with Mandravia on my machine.

So that’s what I’ve been doing folks. Instead of illustrating, like a good little artist, I’ve been installing operating systems and playing with graphics tablet drivers (to no avail). But now I’m back illustrating, using a good old pencil, pad and scanner. All supported by Linux.

So more pictures soon.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.