the original visualisation of the character
I was going through pages that I had posted on an old website yesterday looking for stuff that was worth saving – Microsoft wrote to tell me that my previously free Office Live website was going to start requiring payment or it would have it’s domain name taken away. I found a nice digital painting that I had done of a sci-fi character, a spacewoman standing on the surface of a moon. The page also had a nice description of the character and even some stats so that she could be used in the Star Frontiers role-playing game, which is free and still going strong.
The style of the illustration is very flat and comic book however – at the time I didn’t have a graphics tablet to allow me to really paint and I was still learning how to get the most out of graphic image manipulation programs (I was using Photoshop at the time, rather than the free open-source alternative, GIMP).
duplication of the image to layers
So I thought, why not use some of things I have learned in the mean time, and my graphics tablet, to improve the illustration and make it look more like the sort of concept art that might be used at the design stages of producing a new game, animation or movie.
The first step required was to separate the jpeg on to different layers. At the time I produced the original illustration I worked on only one layer, but I couldn’t imagine going back to this method now that I have worked out how the whole layers thing works in digital painting software.
It’s really quite simple in GIMP, I just pushed the button at the bottom of the layers window that looks like two photos on top of each other (highlighted with a red box in the screenshot). I initially created three layers, one for the space woman, one for the moonscape and one for the gas giant hanging there in the background. I then gave them meaningful names (instead of Background, the default name) and added an alpha channel (by right clicking and choosing this option from the pop up menu).
moonscape against green screen
Adding the alpha channel is the trick because when you delete something with the eraser tool the layer underneath can show through if there is an alpha channel on the layer you are deleting. So it’s a simple matter to delete the stuff you don’t want on a particular layer.
This layer for example is the moonscape, so I have deleted the spacewoman planet and backdrop of stars. I added a green layer to the stack because the default background used by GIMP (and Photoshop) is a grey chequerboard pattern and it is easy to miss bits when you are deleting because they are hard to see. To complete the moonscape layer I also painted over the feet with the moon’s brown colours to hide them.
each element has a separate layer now
I decided to give the planet’s rings a separate layer all to themselves too, because I want them to be a little transparent and for the planet to shine through a little bit. This is exactly the sort of effect that is easy to do with layers with the opacity slider.
So with the temporary green layer I made that brings my total number of layers up to five, but of course that’s just the beginning. As I add other elements such as shadows, a backdrop of stars, highlights etc etc the number of layers is just going to grow and grow so I find it really is important to give each one a name that makes some kind of sense.
I then noticed that the woman’s proportions looked a little off. I thought her legs looked a little short. I find that I often draw legs too short when I am sketching because of the foreshortening of the sketchpad. When I stand the sketchpad up to get a good look at what I just sketched I often say to myself, “oops, short legs again.” Luckily with GIMP that can easily be fixed.
I just duplicated the woman and erased the top half of her in the first duplicate, and the bottom half in the second. Then I increased the size of the second duplicate – the legs – and merged the two layers back into one.
better proportions
I then generated a spacescape with the dedicated GIMP spacescape renderer. I love that plugin, just love it – for a sci-fi fan like me it is such an intuitive addition to an image manipulation and digital painting app.
In this image (produced by saving for web – another very useful addon for GIMP) you can see that I have been doing a little work on the planet. I have added a shadow layer on top of it (a black splodge with the opacity of the layer turned down makes a nice shadow) and smoothed out the transitions between the different bands of the gas giant with the smudge tool. I then became worried that she was looking a little lost and lonely out on the gas giant moon like that and decided to put a spaceship in the background of the image to imply that there is a crew of other characters to keep her company as she adventures through the game, or we follow her story in the animation or film. I decided to use the sc-fi concept art of a spaceship I had been working on most recently.
sci-fi concept art with spacewoman and spaceship
I’m going to keep working on the illustration, adding shadows, making the ligting more dramatic, adding detail and definition to the spacesuit and the spacewoman’s face – which might require some research to find some good refferance material to use. It promises to be a long but hopefully rewarding experience. Once it is complete I will be posting the finished concept art illustration here to the content section of the website.
