This is another illustration created in answer to inspiration from the Illustration Friday website. You can read more about how inspiration struck for this image here.   Here at the main illustration and portfolio website we will be looking at how this image was painted, step-by-step.

This illustration is a digital painting and no paper or pencils were used at any point in the creation of the image. Instead I switched on my trusty old laptop and opened GIMP. GIMP is an open-source image manipulation application, and a very good one which is being actively supported and improves all the time. The main advantage of something like GIMP over the likes of Photoshop of course is that GIMP doesn't cost a bean. GIMP can be downloaded from here.
Along with GIMP I also used my graphics tablet. Now graphics tablets can cost thousands and thousands of dollars, but I have the bottom of the range Bamboo Pen which set me back something like 60 dollars, and I think you'll agree from the images that I have been able to create that you don't have to spend a lot of money.
So with gimp open and my graphics tablet attached I created a new GIMP document, an xcf file. It is absolutely essential to work in this file format, if for no other reason, then because it allows you to work on more than one level within the same image. I created an image 800 pixels by 800 pixels at 70dpi, that's all my old lappy can cope with without melt down. It's a bit of a half-way-house format, for printing the image should be a lot bigger 300 dpi with 3000 pixels along one edge, and for the web it's way too detailed.
I like painting with this extra detail though and exporting smaller jpegs to use on the web with the GIMP save for web plugin. If you're using Ubuntu like me you don't have to install save for web separately, it comes with the big pack of addons available in synaptic.

Without even touching the white background of my image I immediately created a new layer with transparency and started sketching on that.

This sketch is just going to be a guide so it doesn't have to be perfect. As you can see my sketch is quite rough and ready, and is quite different from the way the final image eventually turns out. That's the way I like to work, making changes – sometimes quite big changes as the illustration evolves. Of course coming up with a sketch isn't easy, for some advice on drawing and sketching see this page of tips I put together.

Next we start adding the colours.  Each element that you colour in, like the cat's body here...

should get it's own layer, it makes things easier to adjust later. At one point in the illustration process I had something close to 25 layers in the layer window stack. That's about the level that my computer starts to complain and go slow, but if you have a more modern computer you can have even more layers. 

Once everything is coloured in and you can see where all the elements are you don't need that sketch any more. I just deleted it, but if you want to keep it around you can, by making it invisible with the little eye icon.

The next milestone is where we add shadows. Again as you might have guessed, levels are the key to nice shadows too. Simply chose a really dark colour, black even, don't listen to that impressionist nonsense about never using black, and paint some shadows onto your new layer. At first it will look like an oil slick, but by just turning down the opacity of the shadow layer – the slider at the top of the layers window – you suddenly have delicate transparent shadows. Use the blur tool round the edges unless there's a good reason for the shadow to be sharp.

Now it's time to step back and see if you like what you've painted. Be honest.
After a while it dawned on me that my cat was enormous, dwarfing the trees behind him, but as he is on a separate layer it was child play to resize him without affecting the rest of the image. 

Then I stood him up, by moving the layer with the cat on and drawing some legs, and spent a couple of hours adding finishing touches and building up layer after layer of shadows. Say hello to our creepy vampire cat.