Sci-Fi Tutorials
Since I have started blogging I've noticed that I have been posting my illustrations at various stages of completion and talking about them as I do them. When you pit a few of these blog posts together, especially for the images that take several days to produce, you get something that has quite a few tips and insights into my working process. So that's exactly what I've done. I've put together some tutorials using these blog posts, for your edification and enjoyment.
I hope that they turn out to be useful, at least to avoid some of the crazy mistakes I made while I was putting together digital paintings, 3D renders, and vector illustrations.
As always with Starbright Illustrations, the main focus is on science fiction, but within that niche I have managed to cover a lot of ground as I have searched for the perfect work flow for creating digital colour science fiction illustrations. I have worked with Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, trueSpace and Blender, and some of my illustrations have been loaded into and exported out of ever single one of those applications. Ans all of these applications share the characteristic that they can look very intimidating to someone who has not used digital image processing software before, a friend of mine once compared Photoshop with the complexity of the cockpit of a Boeing 747. The good news is however that the vast majority of people only use a tiny fraction of the tools available when using a modern image manipulation program like GIMP, and they still achieve some truly wonderful results. I hope some of these tutorials will provide inspiration and tips on your way to producing similar results.
Sci-fi digital painting tutorials
This first GIMP tutorialwas a lot of fun to do. I didn't use any reference, I just got out my graphics pad out and started sketching away in GIMP. It was a long journey taking the initial very rough black and white sketch to a completed colour digital painting. There were a lot of different things to keep in mind and quite a few tips and tricks to share.
