Planet Blender

Here is stage two of the illustration that will eventually be the book-cover image, you can see stage one, the initial sketch, in the original post. The main subject of the illustration is really starting to take shape, but a lot of work still needs to go into Ahab and his crew.

To start turning my scan of my initial sketch into an illustration I opened gimp and made a new document of the dimensions I wanted. Then I just dragged and dropped the jpeg image of the scan into the new gimp document. I then resized it to cover the whole image and I was ready to go, time to plug the graphics tablet into the USB port. On top of the scan of the initial illustration I added four or five large areas of colour to the image.

The whale is one solid block of colour on a separate layer, and so is the wave, boat, flippers etc. You can see the first few layers of the image in the screen grab below, but of course I’ll be creating an awful lot more layers than these few. The more layers you have the more control over your picture you have.

You can see that I have switched some of the layers off in the image above (the eye icons are gone). I did so that I could work on other elements without the whale for example getting in the way.

Just a few more details have been added here. You can see the clouds have been painted very roughly into the background and I’ve just started to make them more cloudy with the smudge tool. I’ve also given ol’ Moby some teeth.

The distinctive white colour of the mythical beast from this illustration comes from barnacles. I did a bit of research and it turns out that our creature from the depths was not an albino. This image is right at the start of the process of adding this colouration.

After twenty minutes of repeatedly jabbing the graphics tablet with the stylus the look of the main character is starting to take shape. It still looks a little like the measles though so I’m not going to be able to close GIMP for the day just yet.

I added a big shadow on top of the layer of the illustration with the colouration and then finally added a layer of patchy white underneath that layer to produce first a bumpy but imposing effect and then a much smoother and more frightening creature. The star of the this book, although most people probably read Moby-Dick as an ebook these days, and there’s no reason why an illustration like this cant be its digital cover.

Digital painting illustrations for classic out-of-copyright books.

I was surfing the Internet looking for outlets for the artistic talent on display at Starbright illustrations, and as I was clicking around I found the websites of a few mainstream illustration agents, such as The Artworks here, and I noticed an interesting thing. These mainstream sites didn’t feature a lot of illustrations of robots, spaceships or monsters. It seems that if I am going to interest illustration agents in representing my work I’m going to have to include some more mainstream subject matter.

A subject that did seem to turn up repeatedly in the portfolios of the artists that are represented is book covers. I saw illustrations for a few modern interesting books and I thought why don’t I include book cover art in my portfolio?

It seems like a really good idea, but there is a problem, I’ve never actually been commissioned to produce cover art for a book.

But then of course I came up with the solution, if I hadn’t I’d hardly be writing this post. I’ve often raided the fantastic Gutenburg site for free ebooks to read, and these books could also be a very useful source of inspiration for my illustrations. Producing art for the covers of classics by the great authors of the English language would be a pleasure and it would also go a long way to diversifying my portfolio and making it more accessible to the non nerdy comic book fan. As you can see from the sketch accompanying this post my first project will be Moby-Dick, and I’ll be posting my progress as usual while the illustration evolves and gradually moves towards completion.