Planet Blender

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.

Hello again from the illustrator’s blog. The illustration I’ve been most recently working on has suddenly gone off in a completely new direction. As you can see it is still a very much fantasy orientated illustration, but the evil magician who was trying to catch the pixies has changed into a crocodile. I have been working on this illustration in GIMP for quite a few hours now. I have been sketching up a storm on my graphics tablet.

Last time we saw this fantasy illustration the main character was still human. I was making little changes, here I have added some detail to one of the pixies and changed the colour of the magic users cloak to yellow.

The image had been starting to look a little flat to me and I was trying to spice it up. I kept changing little things.

But then I suddenly had the idea, “Why don’t I paint the main character in the illustration as a crocodile!”

With GIMP that’s the easiest thing in the world to try out, you just add a new layer on top of the image and paint in the changes to see if you like them. If you decide that you don’t like the new direction after all, then just delete the new layer, no harm done. I did like the new direction though. I think the picture looks a lot better with a green monster painted in instead of the magician.

I gave all his clothes a more yellow look by painting transparent yellows over the original image on new layers. I also edited out the jar. I think the new green monster at the centre of this picture would have more immediate plans for the pretty little magic creatures he is trying to catch. Yum, yum!

After taking such a radical approach to redesigning the main character of the illustration I decided to be equally radical with the image’s background. I’ve sampled the colours from the original background, but redistributed and opened out the trees. This should give me a bit more room back there to add nice little details.

Huge changes and redesigns to the illustration might not be the most efficient work flow when it comes to creating digital fantasy paintings, but I just can’t help it. If I have an idea for the illustration that I think will look good then it is hard to resist giving it a try.

Needless to say the illustration is still far from complete and there will be more exciting installments about how it is being created to come.