MyPaint

Spaceship Art and Character Sheet for Heroes in Time role-playin game

By The Illustrator | 2011/08/12 12:50 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Heros in Time, Illustration, MyPaint, Photoshop, Role-Playing Games | Comments (0)

There is an ocean of starts, and this spaceship is designed to ride the swells. More work has been done on Heroes in Time again, and this time I’ve added a character sheet that can be downloaded for free.

The game itself is available here (just click the nice attractive banner, it goes directly to the Heores in Time page)

Naturally the first place I turned for inspiration in designing the character sheet was Wikipedia. The wikipedia page on character sheets is huge, and has a lot of useful information, but I wanted to keep the sheet as simple as possible. Heroes in Time is a cinematic and generic game where a barbarian could easily encounter an astronaut, and the character sheet needs to be versatile enough to accommodate these two very different types of player character.

The various genres that player characters can be drawn from include.

modern horror, and the legions of undead that have to be faced,

other planets, and the monsters that inhabit them,

the far future, and the droids that protect its treasures,

primeval fantasy, and the giants that still walked the Earth,

magic

sword and sorcery, and its beautiful dangers,

And what game would be complete without mech-on-mech combat.

Superhero role-playing game set in a sci-fi future

By The Illustrator | 2011/06/20 18:51 Posted in FATE, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint, Role-Playing Games | Comments (0)

Who Needs a Spacesuit?

To Infinity and Beyond

I’m writing a new role-playing game. It’s going to be a game that tries to capture that special genre of superheroes who fight for truth and justice in a far-future sci-fi universe. I already have a role-playing game that simulates the type of far-future space opera setting where anything can happem. It’s called Extreme Future (and it’s available from the biggest RPG site out there RPGDriveThru).

I don’t just want to make a supplement to Extreme Future though. I have done supplements for the Extreme Future RPG before, such as the Fuwalda Spaceship Handbook. I want to do a whole future superhero themed game, so that I can build the whole game around a detailed superhero creation process. The game will be compatible with Extreme Future, and also with the fantasy RPG Realms too, and the most difficult part of all is that I want to include an entire episode of a superhero comic.

I’ve never really done sequential art before, but I’ve read a lot of comic books, especially from the sci-fi future hero genre, and I’ve always wanted to have a go. I’m going to be aiming for a style with the art that’s more Mike Mignola, and McMahon than the usual Eclipse style art you see in indie comics, and I’m hoping it will give the finished role-playing game a lot of character.

It’s going to be a challenging project, and as soon as it’s done it’ll be going on my RPG Publisher’s Page at RPGDriveThru, oh and of course their comic’s site too.

Dusty – the cute t-rex – for Illustration Friday

By The Illustrator | 2011/01/21 21:30 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (0)

I'm parched!

I decided to do a real quick illustration for the art challenge site this week, little more than a doodle really. But despite that, I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. As usual I first opened MyPaint to scribble out an initial idea for the illustration, because MyPaint lets me feel free. It’s a painting application that tries not to put any borders between you and creativity, and that means you don’t even have to define edges for your illustration. There is an infinite canvas to scrawl on.

I usually open up the images in GIMP and trim them to a nice regular rectangle, but this time I’ve decide not to. I think the rough edges are in keeping with the swift and spontaneous style of the illustration.

I initially wanted to paint an empty desert landscape, but got a little bored and decided to add a lizard who was a little uncomfortable looking in the hot sun. Once I had landed on that idea I kept exaggerating it until the uncomfortable lizard had turned into a Tyrannosaurus Rex that has been driven half mad by thirst.

I chose a colour scheme for the monster to emphasise how hot and bothered he’s getting – reds, oranges and pinks – and I really like this look. It’s so easy to paint dinosaurs boring greens and browns, but I think this probably does them a disservice. They are the genetic melting pot that birds evolved from after all, and so you could probably expect some pretty wild colour schemes back then in the cretaceous.

pirate logo for new blog

By The Illustrator | 2011/01/12 01:52 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Inkscape, MyPaint | Comments (0)

pirate movie logo

My girlfriend has just launched a cool new movie blog. She asked me to do a logo for it and this is what I came up with. As usual it’s all done with free and open-source programs (FOSS), specifically MyPaint and GIMP.

The blog is not about pirating movies, despite the title. It’s about films, with reviews and a whole lot of personal opinion from a blogger with a lot of movie knowledge and a bunch of experience too.

As this image is intended as a site logo we decided to make the edges of the flag and bones as sharp as possible which meant adding another FOSS application into the operation. Inkscape was used to turn the flag into a vector illustration with sharp lines for the final stage.

sharper flag

Cute little monster moon owl illustration and games

By The Illustrator | 2011/01/08 19:23 Posted in Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (0)

cute green monster

This is a cute little green monster moon owl going for a walk outside the super high-tech futuristic city where it lives. I created this digital painting in response to the Illustration Friday art challenge site. The challenge was to illustrate the word ‘deja-vu’ and so I sketched a little monster walking past a statue that seems to be a depiction of itself.

cute monster sketch

Here is the initial sketch I did to illustrate this idea. There have been a lot of changes and additions to this sketch in the completed digital painting. I’ve added lots of different statues behind the monster statue and even a futuristic city in the background.

When not sketching I’ve also been interested in finding good games for Ubuntu. The reason is that it takes Ubuntu about twenty minutes to set up my modem every time I connect it to a USB port – and when I’m not online I just can’t get anything done. About the only thing I can bring myself to do while I’m waiting for my modem to get recognised is some gaming, and this means one or two short bursts of gaming every day while I wait.

I’ve been favouring Extreme Tux Racer, a silly game where you guide a penguin downhill and it eats fish, but I’ve got my feelers out looking for some kind of cool sci-fi game instead. The only issue is that I won’t be able to play any campaign games or anything complicated – as soon as the modem is recognised I connect to the web and gaming is forgotten. I then do something useful instead, like open up MyPaint and strt sketching, with a world of reference images just a Google search away. Ahh heaven!

Resolutions, illustration for IF art challenge site

By The Illustrator | 2011/01/01 17:46 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (2)

Milt vows never to eat carrots again

When I saw that the art challenge word for this week’s illustration at Illustration Friday, the art challenge website, was resolutions the first thing I thought of was food. How we all eat way too much of it, and how we resolve every year to eat less. I’ve illustrated this facet of the human condition with a cute character – a rabbit called Milt – who is pictured at the moment he vows never to eat a carrot again.

It’s my first illustration of the new year and I’m very happy that I found time to get down to being creative. I had started the picture last year. It was going to be a pink rabbit standing in the snow.

first sketch

As you can see, I hadn’t gotten very far with it yet. It was a relatively simple task to change the concept of the sketch to use the same cute character for the art challenge, and give him a bunch of carrots to play with. I sketched most of the image with MyPaint, but I also used GIMP for some more complex image manipulation tasks such as duplicating carrots and pasting them onto the image in the desired places.

only one carrot

Here is milt before I used GIMP to duplicate the carrots. I did a bunch of other work to this image too, to make it less painterly and more a cute character kind of image.

Winter wonderland digital painting

By The Illustrator | 2010/12/28 18:50 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (2)

Winter Wonderland

In response to the Illustration Friday art challenge this week I have done a nice little digital painting using MyPaint. I am as always having a lot of fun using MyPaint, and I still find it hard to believe that such a powerful piece of software is available for free. Today I used the tree brush for the first time – for the trees in the background – and they were great.

I’ve also added the ora plugin for GIMP that allows me to work on the same image with both open-source image manipulation programs, swapping easily between the two as I go. Combined with my Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet this is an incredibly powerful digital painting setup – and it can be put together without breaking the bank.

A phenomenon is an extraordinary event – game illustration

By The Illustrator | 2010/12/10 18:48 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (0)

Another hour’s work brings a lot more definition to the image. The brave adventurer is starting to get some nice sharp outlines to his space suit. The colours have become darker and more muted too, just the way I like them.

A sort of space elf

Building on the very rough shapes of the previous image, this digital painting is getting closer to the colours and shapes that will be seen in the completed picture. It was also at this point that I decided to make the phenomenon a kind of magical creature that is bewitching the spaceman. The sort of thing that is often encountered while playing computer games.

This is the next stage on from the original fields of colour. I have added more detail to the face and the spacesuit is starting to take shape too.

In response to this week’s art for Illustration Friday art challenge (the word phenomenon, which in popular usage, often refers to an extraordinary event according to Wikipedia) I decided to do something that could be a splash scene in a computer game. Or at least the concept art for such a cutaway scene in a video game.

I decided, based on the word, that the game should be a fantasy quest type game, with lots of scope for magic. I found some nice concept art for games inspiration here.

Prehistoric monster for Illustration Friday

By The Illustrator | 2010/12/05 17:11 Posted in GIMP, Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (0)

T Rex say Grrrr!

I love painting prehistoric monsters, and I love my new app – MyPaint. In fact I did a couple of dinosaur illustrations as part of my portfolio to get on to a graphic design course. I also did some giant robot paintings and other assorted game and sci-fi movie related images.

Of course because I was trying to get a place on a degree course I said I was influenced by fabulists such as HG Wells rather than pulp hacks such as Frank Frazetta, but we know the truth don’t we.

Give me a dinosaur with a death lock on a spaceship any day, and it’s only after I’ve finished the illustration that I’ll maybe try and come up with some kind of scientific justification for it. Worrying about the composition or the influences of renaissance masters are all very much secondary too. First and foremost the painting has to go grrr! And with dinosaurs that means lots of teeth and bad attitude.

Edit—

bit more work on the dino

I just got home from the pub and decided to do a bit more work on this dinosaur illustration. It’s a question of building up lights and shades around the original base colours to make the image more and more detailed, without making the image over worked and dead looking, like a wax works.

There’s actually not much chance of that with me. I’m already thinking about moving on to the next digital image that I want to create. I’m thinking about maybe a robot dinosaur. Now that would be cool.

Sneaky art for Illustration Friday with open-source apps

By The Illustrator | 2010/11/24 13:37 Posted in Alchemy, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint | Comments (2)

Sneaky

Wiktionary definition – Sneaky – 1. Difficult to catch due to constantly outwitting adversaries. 2. Dishonest.

Catching those thieves will be hard, they’re so sneaky they keep eluding us.

This is the word for the Illustration Friday art challenge this week. Although I had a few ideas already, my first step was to start Alchemy (from the open drawing project), and see what my subconscious mind might produce. BTW – even if you don’t want a new drawing and painting app it’s worth visiting the Alchemy homepage to see the video they have there showing a graphics tablet slung around the presenters neck like a base guitar as he draws live on stage on a JumboTron. Well, actually it’s just a projector, but JumboTron sounds way cooler. How long before graphic designers and digital painters are recognised for the rock gods that they actually are, deep inside.

Alchemy inspiration

Playing around in Alchemy for just a few minutes allowed me to build up a very complex and random image, although it conforms suspiciously closely to the image I already had in mind – so there must be sum subconscious direction of the graphics tablet stylus. I could already see a few sneaky characters lurking within the graphic shapes of this image and the next stage was to begin to focus on one of them and bring him out.

I exported the image from Alchemy as a png and loaded it into GIMP (the GNU image manipulation program) to do some trimming, cropping and processing. I cropped out an interesting segment from the centre of the canvas and deleted some of the colours (replacing them with a transparent alpha channel).

Image cropped and given transparent background

GIMP shows me I have a transparent background by using the grey checkers pattern.

Now came the real fun part. I loaded the image into MyPaint, my current favourite digital painting app, to actually turn what was in my head into an illustration for the art challenge. Actually the next thing I did was update GIMP to version 2.7 so that I could swap files easily between GIMP and MyPaint. (I had these Python issues though and wasted two or three hours trying to fix them, and it still didn’t work. So ora file support in GIMP is broken for me, oh well).

Here it is.

When I finally opened Mypaint and started working on the image I was quite pleased with the results. It’s nice as is, but I think I’ll keep working on it, and make it a bit more painterly.

Starbright Illustrations (blog)