biography
A native northwesterner, Chris Sumption was born in Portland, Oregon. He moved with his family to Seattle, Washington in 1975 where he spent a lot of time watching airplanes land and blowing stuff up. In 1993 he obtained his first degree in Industrial Design at the Seattle Art Institute. He is currently working on his second degree in Computer Science with a minor in History.He currently resides in Seattle with his wife Caren, where he drinks Mountain Dew Slurpees and works in illustration, graphic design, web design, web development and photography. In his spare time, He also pursues research into historical archiving encoding standards and applications.
“Snapshots From the Black Hole and Other Oddities”, A New Cover by Chris Sumption
I just completed a brand new illustration for the cover of K.C. Ball’s upcoming book, “Snapshots From the Black Hole and Other Oddities”, published by Hydra House Books.
This particular piece is approximately 22″ x 16″ and was created with GIMP. A full size version of this image can be found in the illustration section of my portfolio.
October 7th, 2011
The Creative Process While Illustrating With Digital Mediums | Installment Two
This time I chose to use GIMP over Painter or Photoshop.
On my last major piece I tried out Painter 11. I did not enjoy using that application and I still cannot get used to illustrating with Photoshop. I can design with Photoshop and I can manipulate images with it, but I have some kind of mental block when trying to be loose with it. It might be the fact that I use it for web layouts and I’m constantly worrying about pixel widths and hexadecimal color numbers. Maybe I associate precision with Photoshop so it’s more difficult for me to loosen up with it. I’ll try out the CS5 version before I make a final judgment.
Anyway, I decided to go more minimalistic in my Illustration platform. Since I liked Painter 7, I decided to try an open source option and went with GIMP. To me it felt more like working with Painter 7.
September 24th, 2010
The Creative Process While Illustrating With Digital Mediums
How I got from this to this using Painter 11, Photoshop, and a pad of paper
On a rare occasion, a piece of art comes together like magic, but most of the time it’s the result of proper planning. My latest completed digital painting is an example of what not to do when illustrating (luckily, there was a happy ending).
December 7th, 2009