Starbright Illustrations (blog)

Here is stage two of the illustration that will eventually be the book-cover image, you can see stage one, the initial sketch, in the original post. The main subject of the illustration is really starting to take shape, but a lot of work still needs to go into Ahab and his crew.

To start turning my scan of my initial sketch into an illustration I opened gimp and made a new document of the dimensions I wanted. Then I just dragged and dropped the jpeg image of the scan into the new gimp document. I then resized it to cover the whole image and I was ready to go, time to plug the graphics tablet into the USB port. On top of the scan of the initial illustration I added four or five large areas of colour to the image.

The whale is one solid block of colour on a separate layer, and so is the wave, boat, flippers etc. You can see the first few layers of the image in the screen grab below, but of course I’ll be creating an awful lot more layers than these few. The more layers you have the more control over your picture you have.

You can see that I have switched some of the layers off in the image above (the eye icons are gone). I did so that I could work on other elements without the whale for example getting in the way.

Just a few more details have been added here. You can see the clouds have been painted very roughly into the background and I’ve just started to make them more cloudy with the smudge tool. I’ve also given ol’ Moby some teeth.

The distinctive white colour of the mythical beast from this illustration comes from barnacles. I did a bit of research and it turns out that our creature from the depths was not an albino. This image is right at the start of the process of adding this colouration.

After twenty minutes of repeatedly jabbing the graphics tablet with the stylus the look of the main character is starting to take shape. It still looks a little like the measles though so I’m not going to be able to close GIMP for the day just yet.

I added a big shadow on top of the layer of the illustration with the colouration and then finally added a layer of patchy white underneath that layer to produce first a bumpy but imposing effect and then a much smoother and more frightening creature. The star of the this book, although most people probably read Moby-Dick as an ebook these days, and there’s no reason why an illustration like this cant be its digital cover.