GIMP

work starts on new role-playing game cover

By The Illustrator | 2011/08/30 15:17 Posted in GIMP, Heros in Time, Illustration, Role-Playing Games | Comments (0)

My new role playing game is called Heroes in Time and has everything needed to role play across an entire span of history from brutal primeval barbarian sword and sorcery to space opera and its laser battles, but the cover needs work. It is the element of this project that has been most severely letting it down uptil now.

This is the old cover, and it has lots of space opera sophistication, but no primeval brutality, and that is what I am in the process of changing. The new cover already has a more atmospheric colour scheme, and I have hacked out a more action oriented pose for the two player characters depicted. In terms of composition I quite like the way the text of the game’s title leads to what will be a light saber blade then across to the axe before landing up on the player character’s faces, which will of course be contorted in the depths of fear and determination, as most cover art characters are in these situations. The game content is evolving too, and the game itself is available from RPG Drive Thru. I’ll be adding a lot of internal art to the game too, as I work on the rules and add content. The great thing is that because the game covers all RPG genres, I can add whatever crazy ideas come into my head somewhere or other in the game.

Surrender Illustration Friday cute children’s character digital book painting

By The Illustrator | 2011/01/30 14:42 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

Thank goodness for Illustration Friday, without this art challenge website forcing me to put stylus to graphics pad at least once a week I’d probably never get anything done. This week they have given us the word, “surrender” to get our creative juices flowing.

children's art digital painting wip crash screengrab

crash screenshot

As usual I opened MyPaint to start playing with ideas and come up with an image that i could turn into a picture suitable for a children’s book, or maybe a cartoon. I hadn’t been painting very long when the damn thing crashed on me. It left an image of what I’d been working on which I could get off the screen with my screen shot app, but it was still an uncomfortable experience. It was about this time I started asking myself if I really needed MyPaint, and the answer I came back with is that i probably don’t. I can simulate all the things I like about MyPaint in GIMP. I can resize the canvas (although it doesn’t happen dynamically. like in MyPaint) and I can use a calligraphy brush with the opacity turned down to make a brush that comes close to the one I fell in love with from MyPaint. It feels to me like I learned a lot from MyPaint and the way it was set up to help you paint and be creative, but I’m probably going to be going back to GIMP. It does digital painting almost as well as MyPaint – and it does a whole lot more besides.

first work in progress

After importing my screenshot into GIMP and tidying up, I set the brushes the way i learned from MyPaint and started working directly on the image in GIMP. Here I first add the sky and a few other details.

more colour for children's illustration for picture book

more coloursl for image

A few minutes later I’d gotten rid of almost all of the white ‘paper’, an important psychological step in my digital painterly practice. I haven’t done anything else to the clouds for example, but they look much better now when they are competing with fewer open spaces of white.

shadows and arrows

Next I used GIMP’s duplicate layer function to add lots and lots of arrows. All of a sudden it’s easy to see why this little creature is throwing it’s arms up in the air in surrender. Then it was off to Wikipedia for cowboy hat research images. I’m doing this more and more as I paint now. Another great advantage of doing digital paintings at the computer.

nice hat

Now, after a little bit of research with Wikipedia on cowboy hats and muskrats the image looks a little more detailed. I think I chose a muskrat for this image because I was remembering that kid’s cartoon Deputy Dawg. Here we see some pictures of Muskie the Muskrat

better cactus

The image is getting more and more complex. With each new element I add a new layer, and even though I merge layers together as soon as I can, I still have quite a list of different visual elements on different layers making up the picture at this point.

many layers

looking more like a children's book illustration

Perhaps those boots and the background are a little too realistic looking. That’s the problem with using photographic reference. I’ll try and make them more children’s book illustration or cartoon looking.

Render given concept art style makover

By The Illustrator | 2010/11/23 09:41 Posted in 3D, Blender, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, MyPaint, spaceship, Tutorials | Comments (0)

I’ve decided to go back to one of the renders I did of one of my 3D spaceship models, and give it a makeover, to make it look more like a concept art illustration.

First I opened the render in GIMP and removed the background white colour. I added an alpha channel to the layer (to enable transparency), selected the white bits with ‘colour select’ and then clicked ‘clear’ to get rid of the white area and replace it with a transparent background instead.

transparent background for spaceship image

In this screen shot GIMP is telling me the background is transparent by giving it the grey checkers pattern that has become standard across image processing and painting software.

Then I saved this as a png file (png supports transparency) and loaded the file into MyPaint. Then with MyPaint I could add background and foreground detail on different layers to start building up a concept art style image of the spaceship.

Watch out for those rocks!

Refering to my little ‘Doug Chiang’ pdf is inspirational in this process of course, along with a lot of other reference and tutorials from around the web. There is still a long way to go with this illustration of course, but it wouldn’t be a blog without these glimpses behind the scenes and progress reports. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Sci-fi Character concept art illustration

By The Illustrator | 2010/10/13 15:04 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Photoshop, Tutorials | Comments (0)

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.

Another fine spaceship image made with Blender and GIMP

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/17 01:10 Posted in 3D, Blender, Blender, GIMP, GIMP, Illustration, Role-Playing Games, spaceship, Tutorials | Comments (0)

I’ve been modeling spaceships in 3D again, to add to the huge gallery of spaceship art here at Starbright.

It’s not just about expanding the gallery though, playing around with the capabilities of Blender and GIMP is also a lot of fun. I’m working in a style right now that takes advantage of the 3D capabilities of Blender, but then has a lot of work done in GIMP to produce a 3D image that looks like an illustration.

In the illustration above the planet in the foreground has had a lot of GIMP work done on it and looks very painterly, and the planet in the background is straight out of Blender. It has that shiny chrome appearance of a render. It’s going to be the very next element to get a working over as I take this image towards being a completed illustration.

I’m also working on floor plans to go with the spaceship illustration – I know how everyone loves them. I suddenly realised that if I did a screen grab of the top view window in Blender and chose wire mesh as the view option I would have a nice technical drawing of my spaceship without having to do much extra work. So floor plans coming soon, but in the mean time what has been happening with the illustration, well…

Last time we saw the spaceship illustration it looked like this. Just a mesh with the default skin, and not a very complex mesh either, but it is already beginning to suggest the completed spaceship. It’s a simple cube cut in half and mirrored with a few simple transformations; subdivide, extrude and grab.

After just a few more extrude operations the spaceship mesh starts to look much more real. I’ve also changed the colour of the skin that the mesh receives when it is rendered.

Another bump extruded and scaled has been added here to be the cockpit. I’m now very happy with the camera angle and I haven’t fiddled with it for a while, I am still fiddling with the lighting though. I want it a little more dramatic so I added a second light source to brighten up the foreground edges of the spaceship.

More and more detail and complexity being added to the mesh. Even though there is a lot of complexity, it has almost exclusively been achieved by simply extruding and grabbing surfaces I also added a cylinder right at the front of the spaceship.

It’s a tiny detail, but like a cherry on a cake it makes all the difference. I had to join it to the original spaceship mesh to get it to mirror properly. With that little touch I was finished with Blender and it was time to move on to GIMP.

I rendered a nice big jpeg of the finished mesh and dropped it into GIMP. Because I chose a jpeg as the format I had a lot of white background to get rid of, but cutting out a spaceship with hard straight edges is no problem in GIMP. I just held down shift as I used the eraser and GIMP kept my lines nice and straight.

Once I had my spaceship cut out I started to add some details to it. Abstract spaceship details are called greebles in the business and you need to add an awful lot of them before the spaceship starts to look good.

This spaceship has only a light dusting of greebles – an airlock and some windows – it’s going to need a few more.

I also went back to Blender to make a couple of planets – just spheres set smooth with textures chosen from the presets that come with Blender. The foreground planet uses “random noise” and the background planet has the “marble” texture applied.

I’ve made a good start with this image and I have high hopes that it’s going to be my most professional looking spaceship illustration yet, when I eventually get it done.

GIMP step by step Moby-Dick tutorial more detail

By The Illustrator | 2010/04/04 22:05 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

After a quick pause to post my entry for Illustration Friday it’s back to the Moby-Dick painting. I quickly added some spume to the big wave at the centre of the painting and then was about to turn to the whaling boat, when I realised that I don’t really know what a whaling boat looks like.

Thank goodness that all us artists have Google now. To find a nice boat to use as reference I simply had to do a quick Google search. I did the same to remind myself what a whale looks like and to find out what made Moby white. It makes the whole illustration process a lot easier. Here is the page where I found a nice detailed view of the inside of the craft. It’s actually a website for people who build model boats and has a lot more detail in sharper focus than I was able to find anywhere else.

I’m just going to be using it for reference, and I’m pretty comfortable that finding a picture of a boat to use in painting my illustration isn’t cheating. Here I’ve dropped the picture I got from the internet into the GIMP xcf file to make sure I can do it justice.

With the boat in place, and a few alterations made to turn it around to face the danger coming from the background of the illustration, it was time to add some detail to the figures in the boat. At the moment they still look like the match-stick men of an L.S. Lowry painting.

As I’m not entirely sure what the 18 ^th century adventurers I want to put in the picture might look like It’s back to Google.

I found a great bunch of whalers to use as reference. I found them on a blog post where the blogger was boasting of his friend’s performance in the Alaskan Whaler category of the World Beard and Moustache Competition. Based on this photo, I guess the most important accessory to give my crew is an Aron jumper.

I got distracted after working on Ahab for a while and did some work on the eye of the monster whale. I added detail and got it to pop out of the image a bit more. Then I sketched some white lines on the whale.

I did this to give the impression of sheets of water floating down the monster’s hide as it emerges from the depths. To help sell these white squiggles as sheets of water I used the smudge tool to smear them a bit. It’s quite a nice effect.

The picture is really starting to take shape now. Next I decided that the wave needed a bit of detail too. So, going about adding detail to the image in exactly the same way as the stage before, I just drew some lines on the wave in the same colour as the wave’s brightest point.

Then to sell these little touches as natural I used GIMP’s smudge tool to make them a little more complex and smoky looking. I think it looks quite good and gives a good impression as a boat wake.

So now I’m going to keep on adding more and more detail in exactly the same way, until of course I suddenly decide that this illustration is done. I have a feeling that won’t be for a while yet though, I think this image is good for at least another couple of blog posts.

digital GIMP art image with a graphics tablet

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/29 23:11 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

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.

Vampire Cat illustration, with GIMP step-by-step tutorial

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/19 19:38 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

Yum! Packed Lunch!

Although I am far from finished with my troublesome Pixie Catcher fantasy illustration, I’m going to put it on hold for a day because it is Illustration Friday time again. As regular readers of this blog will know – and yes this blog does seem to have regular readers – Illustration Friday is what is known as an art challenge website . This means that every week they post a word, and the online artistic community (i.e. everybody) is invited to create an illustration based on that word. This week’s word is “ expired”.

Probably inspired by the famous Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch…

Mr. Praline: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

( more about the sketch on Wikipedia)

… the word expired is associated with the death of small animals in my mind, and my first ideas for illustrations were to do with zombie parrots and hamsters.

But then inspiration struck and I thought, “Why not a Vampire cute little animal!”

Why not indeed, technically vampires are the undead rather than expired, but I think the idea still holds.

So I fired up GIMP (as you probably know, GIMP is the leading open-source competitor to Photoshop) and attached my trusty graphics tablet to one of the USB ports on my lappy.

My first sketch was as usual a little off composition-wise, but that was easy to fix because I had done the sketch on a transparent layer that I added above the background white layer of the image. I simply increased the size of the layer of the sketch until the central part of the image, with the cat, was all that was left showing.

Now the cat is undoubtedly the focus of the image, as competing elements such as the coffin in the foreground have been forced off the edge. I created a second transparent layer and coloured in the cat.

I also coloured in all the other elements of the illustration in the same rough and ready way, using the sketch as a guide and putting each new element on a separate layer. For example the cat’s body, collar, tag, eyes and teeth all get their own layer. With my graphics tablet and the GIMP brush set to a wide radius this is the work of just a few seconds.

When this process of colouring is far enough along it is possible to just delete the layer of the image file with the sketch on, because it isn’t needed any more.

Because the image is an illustration of a vampire it is almost inevitably a night time picture. To make a nice night sky I have put silhouettes of trees on one layer, a blend from orange to invisible on a layer behind that, then a moon, then a duplicate of the moon on a new layer smudged and with the opacity turned down to make it shine, then behind that a layer with stars and behind that a layer of solid dark blue.

Then to add more character to my character I added a new layer to paint shadows onto the cat, and yet another layer to give it eyelids. As the image is becoming more finished I also dropped the png file I have of my signature into GIMP by dragging and dropping, GIMP then did all the hard work of importing it into the image on a separate layer for me, yippee!

Now where into the phase of adding detail and tidying up. Here I have added some bumpiness to the soil, and I’ve tidied up the lower edges of the grave stones in the background of the illustration. This process of tidying up and adding detail to the image could potentially go on for a long, long time, and it really is a matter of taste as to where you draw the line and say, “ This is a finished illustration!”

I hope you like the Vampire Cat.

Digital Fantasy Painting with pixies using gimp

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/17 15:16 Posted in GIMP, GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (1)

I’m working on another digital painting right now, as usual, with GIMP and my Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet. I have spent a couple of evenings on it, something like eight hours in all, and it looks about half done to me. I am still trying desperately to take my images in a cuter direction, and so I decided to paint an image with pixies in it. It is going to be called The Pixie Catcher when it is finally done.

For people who were not brought up in the UK being read Enid Blyton stories at bed time, a pixie is a fairy like creature, sometimes thought of as being blue. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about pixies.

All I have decided about the pixies in my illustration so far is that they are blue and have wings and a tail. I’ll be adding more detail to them as work on the illustration progresses.

I started work with the largest and most important character in this cute fantasy illustration, the pixie catcher himself. I simply opened GIMP and created a new image (I chose to make it an .xcf file to be able to use all GIMP’s features and save drafts). Then I immediately created a new layer within the image to sketch on, I prefer sketching on a transparent layer, rather than the white background because then I can colour in underneath the sketch more easily. I like to sketch freehand with no reference material, like photographs or thumbnails, because the image always seems more spontaneous and real to me when little or no planning has gone into it. It does mean that I sometimes have some problems to solve as I go on though, but that just adds to the fun.

I liked the way the sketch was going and added more and more detail to the character, adding pointy ears to make him look more like a fantasy creature.

Next I turned my attention to imagining the sort of fantasy world where this image might be set. I have been imagining a fantasy world which might end up being called Spiral Land. There would of course be a lot of spirals and, as you can see here, even the branches of the trees might be more spiraly than usual. I have turned the layer with the main character off, by clicking on the eye icon, so that I can concentrate on the background.

As you can see in this screen shot of the GIMP interface that in the layers window only the forest sketch and the background are enabled with the eye icon.

I then switched the layer with the main character back on and created a new layer below it to add some colour to him.

I then added a couple of pixies flying away from the main character as fast as their wings can carry them. To make the image cuter I had the idea that the trees would be helping the fairies to escape, so I altered the image to have one of the branches curling around the main character’s hat to try to stop him. It’s quite a subtle change, and I might have to add more branches helping the pixies to make this idea more obvious.

Here I have started to add some shadows to the image, you can see the change best on the character’s face. Shadows are really easy to add in GIMP, and they really bring the image to life. Simply create a new layer above the thing you want to add shadows to. Paint the shadows roughly in a dark colour, but turn down the opacity of the layer, using the slider at the top of the layer window. The lines and areas you paint will transform from solid colour to the merest hint of a shadow at low opacity, or quite heavy shadows at high opacity. You can make the edges of the shadows less sharp with the smudge tool, and when you are happy with the effect just right click on the shadow layer and chose the merge down option to add the shadows to your object.

Apart from a few edits like changing the shape of the hat, adding spirals to the main character’s collar and resizing the image to zoom in more on the scene the only difference between this image and the one before is layer after layer of shadows and a lot of time. Although I have also switched off and deleted the layers with the original sketches on because I don’t really need them any more. Now I’m more painting than drawing, but still using the same GIMP tools and my graphics tablet, the best 60 euros I ever spent.

I’m starting to like this image and I’ll be doing more work on it soon. I’ll post the final image here on the blog as soon as it’s done.

GIMP Tutorial section gets a makeover

By The Illustrator | 2010/03/13 16:11 Posted in GIMP, Illustration, Tutorials | Comments (0)

I’ve been working on the tutorials section – including GIMP, Photoshop, etc – at my Illustrations website. It’s going to be a great page when it’s done, with link after link to step-by-step tutorials telling how to paint and render all kinds of images, from sc-fi to children’s book.

But as I was editing it I noticed an ugly problem. When you look at the website on a computer with a wide screen, on an Apple Notebook for example, the title bar is stuck in the left corner and the dividing line below it extends on for an arbitrary number of pixels. It’s really quite untidy, and I’m going to have to fix it.

I’m using Kompozer to create the non-blog part of the site, with all the galleries and tutorials, and it is really quite limited, but I strongly hoped there would be a solution.

This tutorial on using Kompozer to create a site seemed to have the answer. Just put everything in a table that has the precisely attribute and is set to 100%. I quickly gave this a go.

And with a new page, following these instructions it would have been no problem, but this is the main page of my art portfolio website and I have been working on it for a year with more than one web editor, uploading illustrations, moving images and text around and doing a bit of direct poking about in the html as well.

It just wouldn’t work for me for a long time, and then I noticed that deep within the code of the page, its width was being defined. I deleted that line of code and almost everything started working. It only took an hour of trial and error too.

I say almost everything because there was still an annoying white border to the right of the site header. I couldn’t find any way to fix this using the Kompozer WYSIWYG interface, but when I edited the code to copy the same 0 margin value as at left and top, it finally started to look the way I wanted, a solid bar across the top of the screen.

So here is what the illustration site looks like now, oh and there are some nice illustrations to go with my hard won graphic design victory.

Starbright Illustrations (blog)