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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. |
Space Explorer, a sci-fi digital painting tutorial   Before
I was forced to switch to Linux by the untimely death of my Windows
computer i had a working graphics tablet. My graphics tablet was a
wonderful thing, very comfortable to use, very responsive and
surprisingly cheap. Unfortunately it was also very new to the market
and there is still no Linux support for it, although some super nerds
have gotten it going on Ubuntu. Anyway back in those days when it was
still working I would spend hours sketching away with it in either GIMP
or Photoshop as the fancy took me, and this illustration is the result
of one of those happy sketching sessions with my ol' Wacom Bamboo - OK
actually, as you can read in this series of GIMP
tutorial posts, it took two or three sessions to get this complex
digital painting to the stage you see it here. The
first pass at adding colours always results in a cheerful nightmare of
flouresent primary colours. Or at least it does for me. I try not to
worry about it though because as the image progresses I can "wash"
different gradients and semitransparent layers over these first
colouring-book primary colours to make the image more muted, complex
and start to limit the pallet.Limiting the pallet is about using as few colours on the image as possible. Some very effective images by the likes of Frank Frazetta use only one colour in the background and another in the foreground, with a few dashes of other colours here and there. With all the different areas of colour this image looks a bit like a pizza, but by the end of the process it will have unified into a more moody and interesting looking whole.  One
of the great advantages of having the different elements of your
digital
painting seperated onto different levels of the GIMP xcf file and
exporting jpegs with the save for web plug in is that when you need to
work on a certain part of the image that is going to be hidden away at
the back in the final picture, you can quickly bring it to the
foreground, work on it and send it back. You can also keep one
relatively large original file and only share the smaller low res files
on the Internet, which can cut down on some of the pirating and misuse
of your illustrations. Here
the palette is starting to become more limited - I know that sounds
bad, and a modern computer can handle something like a billion
different colours, but it really is a good thing, at least for our
atmospheric brand of science fiction illustration. Everything here in
the foreground is going green, even the greens of the trees have
started to mix toward a dark mid tone version of the riot of colour
they had been before.I've pushed the spaceship in the background further away from the action, unable to help the poor spaceman in the foreground, by adding a white layer between the spaceships layer and the foreground layers. Then I just turned down the opacity of the layer to leave a white haze which nicely simulates the way an atmosphere adds distance in an illustration. It's not at all tricky to do in GIMP, but you have to remember to make sure that the layer you want to make semitransparent has an alpha channel (the alpha channel is where GIMP stores information about how transparent or solid a bit of the final image should be). If there is no alpha channel, just click the button to add one. This is the second repose of the foreground spaceman, and once I had the pose right, because I had made sure to keep him on a separate layer, it was the easiest thing in the world to scale him up to fill almost the entire left hand side of the image and make him the main focus of the illustration.  All
this work had turned the spaceman into little more than a silhouette
however, so it was now time to add layer after layer of detail to him.
When i was happy with each new layer of detail, the orange plates on
the torso for example, I would mix the new layer of detail down onto
the same layer as the spaceman (right click on the layer you want to
mix down, and chose the option from the menu that appears) and make it
a permanent addition. You have to be pretty sure before you do this,
and
sometimes it needs a little bravery, but otherwise the number of layers
in your xcf file can explode.Take a look at the image and try to work out which element of the illustration I worked on next. No prizes for guessing it was the monster.  The
monster needs to be more than a feint orange cloud. So I started
drawing into it, erasing parts of the outline I didn't like and
deciding where the main areas like the head would be. As I was drawing
the monster turned from a space pig type thing to a half lizard, half
crocodile type of thing.I also suggested where the areas of deepest shadow would be, on the underside of the monsters belly and in the deep recesses of its eye sockets. I then added a bit of the detail you can now see at the edge of the monster, spikes, warts bobbles and that sort of thing. Now
comes the fun part, all that's left to do is keep adding little
details, smoothing rough bits and doodling on other interesting bits,
like the vegetation at the feet of the spaceman and the monster in the
image. |