Starbright Illustrations (blog)

Today I am painting a scene that is inspired by the word rescue*. Actually I started painting the scene yesterday, and there might still be some little touches to add to the illustration before it’s done, but enough of that – back to work.

Rescue of course requires a dangerous situation and someone in danger, and naturally someone to get them out of it. In my illustration I decided that the brave heroic figure of the image would be a lion, and the creature in danger would be a monkey. I later changed my mind and decided that the foreground figure of the picture would be an elephant instead. But that’s the beauty of GIMP, or any other image manipulation software that you might like (I know you are all thinking it so I’ll just say it, some poor misguided people even use Photoshop for this sort of thing, no matter the price and the bloat). Whatever application you use, if you put each element of the image on a different layer you can just delete the layer and replace it with very little trouble – replacing your monkey with an elephant for example.

Here is the original sketch for this illustration, and as always I didn’t do any preliminary sketches or look for any reference material, I just jammed my graphics tablet into the USB port fired up GIMP and got going. The composition of the illustration was a little tricky but once I had put the boat on a nice big wave in the background there was plenty of room in the foreground of the image for action.

As you can see in the above screen grab I try not to touch the background and so I put every different element of an illustration on a separate layer. Here the sketch is on a transparent layer – denoted by grey checks – hovering above the background layer.

The next step is a simple and fun series of colouring in. The layers with the different colours on are all separate, and if each layer is put below the layer with the sketch on it’s a lot harder to go over the lines.

Next come the stage where I add detail by overlaying layer after layer of semitransparent black over the bare colours and moving them about and mixing them with the smudge tool. Then I sample the original colour and lighten it a bit by selecting the foreground colour at the bottom of the tool box. I paint this on top at full opacity – on it’s own layer of course, you can never have too many layers – and you have highlights.

The monkey looked too much like a badly drawn human so it had to go, but what to replace it with. I decided that an elephant would be quite funny, because there is no way that the skinny lion in the boat is going to be strong enough to pull the elephant out of the water, even if the boat was big enough for it to sit in without it sinking.

The elephant gets a little more detail with the trusty layers of black and smudge then highlight method I mentioned earlier and the image is getting a lot closer to being a completed digital painting.

*as usual my inspiration word came from Illustration Friday, and I’ll be posting the illustration there as soon as it’s done.