Starbright Illustrations (blog)

Today I’ve been painting dragons. Specifically a forest dragon. It’s a very impressionistic illustrative picture, very painterly, but it was entirely created with GIMP – and of course my trusty graphics tablet. I know I sing the praises of my Bamboo graphics tablet every post, but it really is great and compared to most other new graphics tablets, it’s super cheap.

Anyway this forest dragon is dozing comfortably on a small pile of treasure deep in the darkest corner of a forgotten wood. I started sketching it very simply.

There really isn’t much going on in this sketch, I was exclusively interested in the composition and decided that I would be adding detail as I went, and I think that approach worked quite well. It was certainly quick.

The next step was – as always – to add an area of colour to represent each major element of the picture. Two areas of green, one of brown and one of yellow in this image represent respectively the foreground, the dragon, the trees and the dragon’s eye. Each area of colour is created on a separate layer of the GIMP file.

Next I decided to add some shafts of sunlight to the picture. Even without having to use a graphics tablet, I can’t draw a straight line, well not sun-beam straight anyway, but luckily if you paint a dot then hold down the shift key GIMP will work out a straight line for you.

Then I pushed the layer with the sun beams on further back down the stack of layers and turned down the transparency. It was quite a good effect in the end, I think.

The poor forest dragon in the illustration was looking a bit cramped so I decided to open up the composition of the image a little bit. I did it by creating a new bigger image file and dropping the old file in.

I then added a pile of gold to make the dragon more comfortable, they prefer to lie on gold even than soft forest grass. I also toyed with the idea of adding a thief coming to take a handful of the gold away.

I thought that maybe the colour palette was a little limited, almost exclusively made up of different shades of green, so next I made the dragon a lot more colourful and also made the treasure thief in the foreground of the illustration quite colourful too.

In the end of course I decided against the second character for the illustration, and I toned down the colours again too. This picture isn’t quite ready to join the hall of fame on the gallery page of my website but I am tempted to keep working on it and take it that extra stage.

Who knows… watch this space.