Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/01/15/a-digital-painting-of-a-wilderness-of-stars-oh-and-of-course-a-spaceship/

Every week I go to The Illustration Art challeng website to get inspiration for a digital painting. This week the word on Illustration Friday is “Wilderness”, and me being the science fiction, space ship obsessed nerd that I am, the first idea that jumped to mind was “A Wilderness of Stars”; but where had I heard this evocative phrase before. I started Googling and found …

A Wilderness of Stars by William F Nolan

It seems it was a the title of a collection of science fiction stories, which included a work by the writer of that sci-fi classic Logan’s Run – man, you can find anything out on Google. That would fit for where I had heard the phrase, if it was the title of a science fiction book that might have been hanging about in second-hand stores in the 70s then the title could easily have lodged itself in my subconscious round about then.

I wasn’t satisfied with my Googling though. I wondered if a third rate hack science fiction writer could really have come up with a phrase like this. A phrase that is hard to forget once you hear it. It turned out that he didn’t, the phrase is part of a quote by Mark Twain.

“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God – man – the world – the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars – a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space – and you!”

If Twain got it from somewhere even earlier then I didn’t find out by just Googling. Anyway it seems to me to be perfect inspiration for a digital painting of a spaceship against a backdrop of the wilderness of stars. So I fired up GIMP and attached my drawing tablet to the USB port for some painting.

I started by sketching out the shape of a spaceship freehand using GIMP and my Bamboo graphics tablet. Sketching out these virtual paintings this way, is becoming surprisingly easy and intuitive after a couple of months of practice.

Next I chose a colour for the spaceship and added it to a new layer underneath the frame. I’m not sure green was a good choice for the colour scheme of the image, and luckily we are still early enough in the digital picture painting process to easily  be able to change it to something better.

I added some bright blue to a layer below the spaceship, then duplicated it and turned the transparency down on the two layers. Then I smudged the layers and it looks as though radioactive fire is shooting out of the spacecraft’s engines. Excellent.

This spaceship painting is still at a very early and developmental stage, be sure and pop back to the blog to see this abstract shape turn into a beautifully realised cruiser of the wilderness of stars.