Illustration Friday

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.

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.

Shark-like spaceship design with exaggerated perspective

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/26 20:11 Posted in Illustration, Illustration Friday, Illustration Friday, Spaceships, role-playing game | Comments (2)

From now on I’m going to be coming at all my sketching from a spaceship or science fiction point of view, because it seems to be what the vast majority of visitors to this site want. Every week I’ve been producing sketches for an art challenge called Illustration Friday, and these sketches are going to be no exception to the new sci-fi spaceship ethos of the site.

The word this weak on Illustration Friday is “perspective” and this seems the easiest thing in the world to turn to a spaceship theme, after all it is very common for a sci-fi artist producing an illustration for their spaceship design to show off it’s vast size by adding exaggerated perspective to the image.

I’ve done something similar in the image above, by exaggerating the perspective of the spaceship in this image I have added to the feeling that it is screaming along – although in space nobody can hear you scream – very low over the surface of an asteroid.

I created this sketch very quickly, which is one of the aims of Illustration Friday, but I’m actually very happy with it. The spaceship looks very dangerous and powerful indeed. I have given it a little streamlining so that it can land on the planets of an unsuspecting role-playing game universe, but it is still very much a large spaceship. It’s very at home in the empty voids of the spacelanes of any game setting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I make time to work this image up into a finished illustration, using either GIMP, Inkscape, Blender or all three. I might even take time to work out some floor plans, complete the design and statistics and write some fluff about it. I’m really quite pleased with it.

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.

Pioneer Spaceship for Illustration Friday

By The Illustrator | 2009/12/26 23:57 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday | Comments (4)

I was very pleased to see that this week’s word on Illustration Friday is Pioneer. I draw a lot of spaceships with GIMP, and design a lot of 3D spaceships too, with Blender, and pioneering is one of the coolest tasks a spaceship can be put to – to boldly go and all that.

For this Illustration Friday image I have added a very literal human pioneer in the foreground of the picture, as well as the pioneer spaceship in the background. There is a hideous alien monster lurking in the bushes too, about to make the astronaut pay for his curiosity with his life, or at the very least scare the living daylights out of him.

This illustration is perhaps not the finished image just yet – I’m thinking there may be some more mileage in it. It has some of the sketchy guidelines of the image which I produced in GIMP with my graphics tablet, and some of the colours of the finished image blocked in too, again in GIMP. I’m thinking of it more as a concept sketch for an electronic painting.

It has already gone through a couple of stages before being considered a finished concept sketch, with colours and shapes being added over several layers. I have saved the illustration in the native GIMP format as well as these jpegs so that it will be very easy to go back to it and bring it from the concept sketch it is now to the completed virtual painting that I think I can see lurking within.

To get it to a more polished and detailed state will require a load more foliage in the jungle, and greebles on the spaceship. The jungle foreground should be darker and the spaceship, planets and sky background should probably be even lighter.

The choice of an alien jungle for the setting of the image is of course explained by the fact that I’ve just seen Avatar, and I loved it. I also got a book of the concept images for the movie, which I’m currently leafing through, and it is interesting to see how many of the design and visualisation images for this sci-fi extravaganza were obviously put together on a computer without harming a single sheet of real, honest A4 paper.

The Hatch Dragon Illustration, Saved for Web thanks to the GIMP Plugin Registry

By The Illustrator | 2009/12/11 19:48 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Illustration Friday, Tutorials | Comments (0)

This week we internet artists are being challenged with the word “hatch”. Now of course this is going to produce one or two images of dragons hatching from eggs, produced by the more fantasy, science fiction and role-playing game minded – like me – but it could also be associated with a hatch in the hull of a spaceship. Decisions, decisions… hey wait a minute, how about a dragon coming out of a hatch in a spaceship, now that would be really cool.

I reached for my usual swift internet illustration tools, GIMP and a graphics tablet, and started sketching in the main shapes.

I reached this stage quite quickly and, because the image was already beginning to look interesting, I started to miss the old days when I was using Photoshop and I could hit a button called “save for web and devices” at any time to create a snapshot of my progress at various stages during the creation of an image. I wondered if such a feature existed for GIMP.

Well apparently it does, Save for Web | GIMP Plugin Registry.

So the next question was, how do I add a plugin? Luckily the plugin comes with a readme file that gives simple instructions on how to do this. It’s a simple matter of unpacking the exe file and copying it to the correct directory.

I tried it out, and it worked first time, allowing me to get right back to working on my image. Next I hatched in some of the areas of the dragon with an approximate idea of the colours it might have in the finished image.

Then I added layer after layer, adding detail to each with my stylus, and quite a small brush selected.

With each layer I alternated between adding dark colours, shadows and black on one layer and light colours, highlights and tiny dabs of white on the next. With each layer the borders between light and dark become sharper and the illustration becomes more detailed and defined. I have recently been experimenting with the different pressure and angle settings of the graphics tablet, and how GIMP interprets them, but in this image I have turned all these effects off. I’m beginning to think my style is raw and energetic enough without adding these artificial sources of jitter and irregularity to my illustrations.