Starbright Illustrations (blog)

I’ve been meaning to add tutorials to Starbright Illustrations for a long time. I’ve been putting a lot of effort into learning programs like GIMP and Photoshop and trying to get good results, and I thought it would be a good idea to share what I have learned. I wouldn’t say that I’m a power user or a professional or anything, but I have spent some time with these apps, and I have gotten some results that I’m quite happy with from time to time.

So here it is, my first GIMP illustration tutorial, and it is of course a science fiction image.

It took me about three days to create the image and I was exporting images from GIMP at every significant stage using the Save for Web extension.

The tutorial that has appeared on the Starbright site is based on a series of posts about a GIMP illustration project from this blog – that’s right you read it here first – and the blog version, which spans three posts, is still probably the more detailed version.

The image was made with my Wacom Bamboo graphics pad, but it’s a while since I used it. It isn’t supported in the Linux kernel yet and since my Windows machine died that means it just won’t work any more. But I’ve got my eye on the Mandriva forum, and a few other places – whatever Google throws up really – so I’m hopeful that there’ll be a solution, a kernel patch, a driver or something of the sort soon.

It’s the only thing missing from my artistic arsenal though, overall I’m very happy with Linux in general and Mandriva in specific, so expect more tutorials soon, just not for the graphics tablet.