| Starbright Illustrations |
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Visit the Starbright Illustrations Blog to see the latest images I'm working on and find out about the latest tips I've discovered. Email me at fitzpatrickbrett at yahoo.co.uk with the details of your illustration job for a quote. |
Gifted Bunny, a GIMP digital painting tutorial
This tutorial takes you step by step through a surprisingly simple GIMP digital painting, using the Wacom "Bamboo Pen" graphics tablet.
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As usual I started with a new blank GIMP image and my graphics tablet,and I just started sketching. I also opened GIMP and started a new image. The first thing I did was add a new transparent layer to the image, and I started sketching on that. It makes it so much easier to colour in when the lines float on top of the picture and you can colour in below. It’s impossible to colour over the lines! | ||
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Next I started colouring in the image, I wanted to avoid any trace of the sinister in this image and have the rabbit be extremely cute, so I roughly tried to suggest its shape with a very bright blue. All the different elements of the GIMP image are of course on different layers, and I am using the “save for web” add on to quickly produce these low data thumb nails to illustrate this post. | ||
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As I was adding more detail, and colouring in more of the elements of the picture, I decided that the rabbit should actually be reading his fortune, I have no idea why, it just seemed more interesting I guess. So I increased the size of the table in front of the subject of the image and painted in some cards, free hand, like everything else in the image. | ||
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I was quite
pleased with
the way the image was progressing but I had my usual issue of too many
dissimilar colours lying on the image like a pizza topping. To solve
this problem I painted a layer of solid brown, dark brown, as the top
layer of the image. Then I turned the transparency of this layer down
until I could see the elements of the image through this top brown
layer. It immediately pulled all the different colourful elements
together into one unified image.
Then I used the eraser tool to cut holes in this layer for the door and window, and edges that would be caught in the beams of light coming through them. It had a very dramatic effect. |
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Then I
resized the image, I used the scalpel tool from the GIMP
toolbox, and darkened only the layer with our card player on, using the
brightness contrast tool from the colours menu. I thought it was
already working as an image, after just two, or three hours work, but I
wanted to add finishing touches such as images on the
faces of the cards and a picture within the frame hanging on the wall. |
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With
everything united by this brown layer it was suddenly difficult to work
on the background and the character independantly. It was quite a problem, and I decided on quite a radical solution. I combined all the layers I had been working on into one nice unified brow-looking underground layer. Then I duplicated this layer and added a third layer inbetween. I coloured the inbetween layer in with a solid colour, as you can see I chose red. Then I selected the top most layer and erased everything except my character, the card-playing rabbit. Then when I deleted the red layer, I once again had the foreground character and the background on different layers of the image, which is the way I like to work. |
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Now
with my caharacter on a seperate layer I added yet another layer and
started to add highlights to the rabbit, getting rid of the strange
dark fur that was left over from previous experiments with the look of
the main character. I added another layer between the character and the background and added a shine effect by colouring in the door with a bright vanilla yellow, then turning down the transparency ofthelayer and smudging the edges of the yellow shapes. |
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Next I
zoomed in on the card table with the magnifying-glass tool.
I added images to the cards. Each image on three layers with a sky,
background and foreground, just as if I was painting a main image. |
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The rabbits
arms were starting to look a little stumpy to me, so I gave him some
nice fluffy white fingers. I initially added the fingers on a seperate
layer, and once I was happy with them I mixed the layer down to add
them to the main character layer. |
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I then added
a lot of detail to the background, layer after layer of shadows at half
transparency. After I was happy with the changes I mixed it all down so
that I once again had my usual three layers. |
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It's
possible to go on like this forever, adding detail, adding new elements. In this next image you can see that I have added yet more detail to the background, some bricks around the window, I've smoothed the character's fur a bit, etc. But I eventually had to call a halt and pull my signature png into gimp from its usual resting place on my hard drive. I rescaled the signature down into the bottom corner and stood back to admire my work. |