Starbright Illustrations (blog)

It’s Friday, and you should probably know the procedure by now.

Every Friday I visit a site called Illustration Friday which provides a showcase for the work of artists from around the world. Every Friday they post a word which is to be used as inspiration for a piece of illustrative art work.

Once I’ve found out this week’s word I look through some of my old illustrations to see if any of them are related to it or, if none seem to fit the bill, I fire up GIMP and create a new piece of digital art with my graphics tablet.

The word this week was “ dip” and I immediately thought of a picture I had painted in GIMP of an elephant dipping his front feet into a pool as he looked at his picture reflected in the surface.

It’s a very dark, atmospheric illustration with a pronounced use of chiaroscuro.

I’m a big fan of this artistic technique, probably because my earliest influences were the black and white ink illustrations of primitive British science-fiction comic books like 2000ad, Starlord and Tornado. Starlord was my favourite and I was quite upset to see it fail and be gobbled up by the inferior 2000ad. An early run in with the triumph of the lowest common denominator, even within a niche market like sci-fi comic books.

Anyway I hope you like this week’s image for Illustration Friday, if you like it there are more illustrations here at the blog (take a look at the menu to the left), and also on the main illustration gallery and GIMP tutorial site.