Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/12/11/the-hatch-dragon-illustration-saved-for-web-thanks-to-the-gimp-plugin-registry/

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.