Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/12/28/ive-found-a-live-and-active-forum-for-the-gimp-includes-art-resources-and-tutorials-but-i-dont-like-it/

I love forums, whenever you have an IT or computer problem and go Googling for the answer it always seems to come from the kind people who hang out in forums. I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out in GIMP lately and I’ve been looking for a forum to post my art and find answers to my problems, and here it is. GIMPER.NET – The GIMP Community – Index page. There does seem to be one big problem though. I don’t see any signature links, and when I created one and previewed it – it looked dead. If the site doesn’t allow signature links, then why should anyone create content for them?

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to keep looking for a proper GIMP forum who don’t mind the people who create the content for them linking away to their own site.

In the mean time I’ve been working on my latest spaceship illustration. When we last saw it, it looked like the image to the left, but it has gone through quite a lot of development since then and as a tutorial-like guide I’ll post some of the iterations here.

First I darkened the spaceman character in the foreground of the image. In this illustration the spaceship is to be an imposing presence, but despite that still a backdrop to the foreground action.

Then I moved the spaceship to the top of the layers pile so that I could work on it without being disturbed by the elements of the image that would otherwise overlap it – a really good reason to keep each element of the illustration on it’s own layer. I added windows, greebles and other details until I was happy with it, for now, and then mixed all the spaceship layers together into one spaceship layer and moved it back down to it’s proper place in the stack.

When the spaceship is in its proper place, it is behind a translucent white layer which nicely simulates the effect of seeing something far away through a lot of intervening atmosphere – the colours fade. I darkened the jungle foliage in the background of the image and worked into it to make a little more detail. I also muted the colours of the monster in the image – which is still a quite abstract shape – because it is going to be lowering in the shadows in the completed picture, if everything goes according to plan.

With only a few light-colour trees in the foreground the brave interplanetary adventurer looked as though he was in the open, so I deleted them and blocked in a shape to better represent the jungle clearing feel that I was originally going for in this digital painting. The adventurer was beginning to look a little lost too, so as you can see in the image to the left, I resized him.

And here we have the current state of play with this illustration. The space adventurer wasn’t looking heroic enough, and it seemed strange that he was looking through binoculars into this dense alien jungle where visibility can’t be more than a few meters, so I’ve bitten the bullet and started to completely redesign him.

You can see the very first stages of this image here, and I’ll be posting updates as I make more progress in bringing this digital painting home, so far using GIMP exclusively.