Planet Blender

After a quick pause to post my entry for Illustration Friday it’s back to the Moby-Dick painting. I quickly added some spume to the big wave at the centre of the painting and then was about to turn to the whaling boat, when I realised that I don’t really know what a whaling boat looks like.

Thank goodness that all us artists have Google now. To find a nice boat to use as reference I simply had to do a quick Google search. I did the same to remind myself what a whale looks like and to find out what made Moby white. It makes the whole illustration process a lot easier. Here is the page where I found a nice detailed view of the inside of the craft. It’s actually a website for people who build model boats and has a lot more detail in sharper focus than I was able to find anywhere else.

I’m just going to be using it for reference, and I’m pretty comfortable that finding a picture of a boat to use in painting my illustration isn’t cheating. Here I’ve dropped the picture I got from the internet into the GIMP xcf file to make sure I can do it justice.

With the boat in place, and a few alterations made to turn it around to face the danger coming from the background of the illustration, it was time to add some detail to the figures in the boat. At the moment they still look like the match-stick men of an L.S. Lowry painting.

As I’m not entirely sure what the 18 ^th century adventurers I want to put in the picture might look like It’s back to Google.

I found a great bunch of whalers to use as reference. I found them on a blog post where the blogger was boasting of his friend’s performance in the Alaskan Whaler category of the World Beard and Moustache Competition. Based on this photo, I guess the most important accessory to give my crew is an Aron jumper.

I got distracted after working on Ahab for a while and did some work on the eye of the monster whale. I added detail and got it to pop out of the image a bit more. Then I sketched some white lines on the whale.

I did this to give the impression of sheets of water floating down the monster’s hide as it emerges from the depths. To help sell these white squiggles as sheets of water I used the smudge tool to smear them a bit. It’s quite a nice effect.

The picture is really starting to take shape now. Next I decided that the wave needed a bit of detail too. So, going about adding detail to the image in exactly the same way as the stage before, I just drew some lines on the wave in the same colour as the wave’s brightest point.

Then to sell these little touches as natural I used GIMP’s smudge tool to make them a little more complex and smoky looking. I think it looks quite good and gives a good impression as a boat wake.

So now I’m going to keep on adding more and more detail in exactly the same way, until of course I suddenly decide that this illustration is done. I have a feeling that won’t be for a while yet though, I think this image is good for at least another couple of blog posts.