Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/12/19/tutorial-for-painting-a-gimp-gallery-spaceship/

I’m painting a spaceship, in GIMP, and you can look over my shoulder and see how it’s done if you like. When it’s finally done I might even add it to my User account | gimp gallery. I just found this gallery on the Internet today and I’m having a look around to see if I like it.

So to start with I got hold of a grainy old free and open source NASA image of a nebula. It’s a bit flat, low resolution and it has some creases on it where more than one photo was stitched together by NASA to produce the final image, but through the magic of GIMP I’m sure we can get it looking pretty good.

Next I added a layer above the background so that I could start drawing a basic spaceship shape without disturbing the original background  image of the nebula.

I started sketching a vague outline in white so that it would show up nicely, and a concept for the spaceship started to form. I thought that with such a beautiful backdrop the brave adventurers aboard the spaceship would like to be able to get a good look outside, so I added, not one, but two observation decks to the top of my design.

Then I just kept going, adding shapes to the spaceship’s hull.

I also worked on the starscape. Adding layers of black to the darker areas and turning down the opacity so the structure can still be seen. I did the same to the nebula, adding washes of pink and orange at half transparency to take away some grainyness without destroying all the structure.

Now it was time to add the greebles. This is a process of doodling in details, like airlocks, windows and other less identifiable hatches, wires, pipes and plates to the surface of the spaceship.

This was all done freehand with some quite rough edged shapes being sketched in on the graphics tablet.

The final step – for now – was to make these greebles more regular by going over them one more time, but this time holding down the shift key quite often to turn use only straight lines drawn between two points. I cropped the picture down to make the spaceship bigger, and I was done.