Spaceship Concept Painting Tutorial
Welcome to the latest digital painting tutorial from Starbright Illustrations. Today we will be painting a medium spaceship swooshing impressively past a planet in the background. The perfect thing for use in illustrating role-playing games and movie ideas.
The very first stage of creating any spaceship concept art is to sketch a spaceship. This is the part that where people can get a little bogged down - drawing windows and adding other detail. I'd advise against this, it's far too early to be investing time in stuff like that, which will probably be in the wrong place, and have to be changed anyway. As you can see below, my spaceship is very rough and ready, and will undergo a lot of changes before the final image is complete.
First I opened GIMP and I created a nice big canvas with a black background, to give myself plenty of room to move things around and play.I used a small square brush at something like half opacity to make the sketch, and of course the sketch, as almost every other element, gets its own layer.
After playing around for a while doing sketches and deleting them again - I happened upon a shape I liked. I created a spaceship with a sort of beak at the front - and that suggested the spaceship's name - Megahawk.
I didn't stop with just one layer of colour though, I added many different shades to give the spaceship some structure. All these layers are still done with the same small brush at half opacity, so that structure is created almost without conscious thought.
Once the spaceship was starting to feel more three dimensional, I had a stab at adding a bit of detail. Some dabs at the front to suggest windows, and some scribble down below to suggest a mighty spaceship engine so robust it doesn't even need armour. My spaceship is starting to have a scale, it's becoming medium sized. This wasn't a conscious decision, it was suggested by the shapes I had been sketching.
Next I used some of GIMPs plugins and features to create a starscape and planet for the background. The planet is a simple filled circle, but the starscape required a Google search to find a GIMP plugin that automated the creation of these kinds of images.
I then added yet another layer and drew some nice blue fusion flames. I then turned down the opacity of the layer and smudged the edges of the flames a bit. You can almost feel the power of the engines hurtling your adventurer's spaceship to the next encounter.
The planet needed a lot more detail of course, but reference for planets is always just a Google images earch away. I was very influenced by Mars in creating the surface detail for this planet.
Then I started to experiment with a colour scheme for the spaceship. Even as I painted it, I was starting to hate it, and I would wrestle with the spaceship paint job for the rest of the painting process, before finally getting to a stage I was happy with.
I added a fanciful bit of lightning to the background of the image - very simple strokes with a square brush, and then smudged with a square smudge tool. I also painted some detail onto the spaceship hull.
Then I got it into my head that the metal of the spaceship was too dark, so my solution was to add some white on a new layer at low opacity to lighten things up. Looking back I'm not at all sure it was worth the bother.
Next I added windows - which are just a square of colour and a square of white on top of each other, then smudge the white square to make light being shone from the window.
At this point I also added my signature. It's an important stage in this age of the Internet, when images and ideas can easily be downloaded. With my signature in the painting, the theory is that wherever my image goes, my name will go with it.
Now I started working in earnest on the shadows. I added yet another layer and painted on it with the blackest marks GIMP can provide. I then turned down the opacity on the layer to make these black marks into delicate shadows.
Even at this late stage, I was still playing with the design of the spaceship. I flirted with the idea of giving the spaceship gun turrets, but they seemed to be too dominant.
I was also playing with the paint scheme on the spaceship. I kept adding more and more red, but wasn't happy with the direction the look of the spaceship was going in.
So I deleted the guns.
I then spent a long time playing with the paint scheme, till I found something that struck me as quite elegant.
I then turned up the contrast on the spaceship, using the sliders to be found in the colours menu, and added some more shadows to accentuate the intense highlights created by the increase in contrast. I could have gone on refining and smoothing the image, and adding detail, but I decided to call it a day here. At least for now...
Related Portfolios of My Art
Role-Playing Game Art
Role-playing games set a unique range of artistic challenges. The most important thing about game art is that it should be believably realistic, but at the same time totally fantastic. Depending on the sort of game in question, images including cutaways of spaceships, concept paintings of monsters or digital paintings of characters might all be required. And these elements are often set against the most fantastic of backgrounds – fantasy worlds of volcanoes rising from ice bound seas, sunsets over deserted asteroids, or primordial jungles stuffed with the most dangerous creatures that can be generated with the game mechanics at hand. Worlds of wonder, in other words.
Vector Art Portfolio
I originally started producing vector art as a source of images and logos to decorate my blogs and sites. Vector art has nice sharp lines, looks real neat online and can be scaled up and down without any loss of detail or too much pixelation. These particular images are a mixture of subjects, but tend toward being more light hearted - perhaps even childlike pictures for children's books. A complete children's book created from vector art can't be far away.
Sci-Fi Digital Painting Portfolio
You can find illustrations of all kinds of science fiction subjects here at Starbright. The sort of images used in designing and promoting things like role-playing games, films, animations and movies. This game spaceship concept art is an image created using three open-source digital painting and art applications, Blender, GIMP and MyPaint. The basic 3D model used to create the image was produced in Blender and then more detail was added using MyPaint. The final low-data web image was produced using GIMP.
There are lots of different types even of sci-fi art from golden-age rocket ships and giant monsters to gritty cyberpunk, and I love ‘em all. I enjoy the different challenges of producing images for each type of sci-fi background.
Illustration Friday Art Challenge Images Portfolio
This is a gallery of various different images, and the only thing they have in common are that they were all produced for the Illustration Friday art challenge site. The way the site works is that a different word is posted every Friday, and then artists from all over the world produce images inspired by that word and link to them on the site. It's a lot of fun and I have produced a great many illustrations in response to these art challenges over the years. You can see some of the best of them in this gallery.
I hope you enjoy journeying through these worlds of the imagination as much as I have enjoyed making them. You can read the stuff I've written about my images, just look at the pictures or even download a 3D blend file to play around with or use these ideas in your own fantasy role-playing games.
And you can also email me to get my artistic talents on your project, or read my blog where I talk about the exciting challenges of producing these images.
