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.

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.

I started this illustration like most of my work. I began with the conception of the foreground objects. This process is identical to what I described in the first installment of this series. The main difference this time was I think I had a better idea going in what I wanted the layout to look like.

I mentioned earlier that I don’t like to illustrate with Photoshop, but I do like to do my layouts with it. The top left and right images above are examples of this. After I finished my concepts I create a simple background (top right), and then play around with the positions of the objects. The background is based off of a photo reference from a shuttle mission. I initially rendered the background shapes and colors with Photoshop using a simple airbrush. I then applied a blur filter to soften it up.

Once the layout was decided, I switched to GIMP to detail the earth background. I then started working on painting the foreground objects. At this point I have flattened the image. I work in layers while positioning everything, but once I begin working on the “painting”, I like the image to be flat. This prevents me from playing around with the layers and in my opinion, allows for more “happy accidents” to occur.

I don’t ever go back to Photoshop until the very end for color correction and / or brightness / contrast adjustments. This is mainly done for printing purposes. You can really see the difference in tonal qualities between the bottom left and right images. In the bottom right image, I have basically turned up the brightness. How much do I turn it up? I have never been able to get my monitor to match a printed output exactly. So I use a reference print, which is a previous “successful” image that I have multiple digital prints on different paper qualities. I then match the current images brightness to the brightness of the reference image, using the darker regions as the reference point.

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).

Step one of my creative process usually starts with pencil and paper. Like a lot of artists, I create my initial sketches of forms and shapes with a blue colored pencil. The fact that I ultimately scan the artwork into the computer probably means I don’t need to do this step, but it does allow me to be free with what I am creating. I then usually switch to pen to clean up the shapes and fill in the details. I still keep things loose at this stage.

Step two is taking the rough image and cleaning it up. I do this by scanning in my sketch, and then either reduce the contrast or the transparency of the layer in Photoshop. This results in a very faint image that I trace, then print-out. I take the print-out, and go over it with a fine point pen, refining the image. Sometimes, if a design isn’t working out, I modify the image in Photoshop by cutting off pieces then combining them into different configurations. For example, a lot of times when working with spaceships or machines, I flip or invert the image and try and to achieve something that looks more dramatic. I then print out the image and ink it again. I repeat this process until I get something I can work with.

This is where I made my initial mistake. The original sketch, as you can see, is inverted. That wasn’t working for me so I flipped the image. After making some refinements, I settled (settled being the key word) for the result. The second thing I did wrong was that I didn’t frame the image properly. I kind of sketched in a loose idea of the background, but instead of locking it in, I went straight to painting. I should have spent much more effort laying out this image before going into production. In the past, I’ve used the lay out method illustrated in step 8, and from now on I’m going to just keep using it.

Step three, already committed to a wrong direction for the piece, I began working on the background. This step is usually from photo reference and done in Corel Painter.

Step four, after the background had been created, I placed the finished sketch on the background.

Step five, I began the painting process for the foreground. Usually, I begin with using various masking techniques in combination with airbrushes, or large brushes. At this point I’m just getting the shadowing in and any textures that I want to occur.

Step six, I started working on the detail and highlighting. By this point, I have usually stopped working with masks and layers altogether and have flattened the image completely. On a side note, when I was beginning with digital illustration, I would religiously save all my layers, but I find I’m more comfortable just working with one layer now. If I make a mistake, I fix it, or undo it if it’s recent.

Here’s where it gets interesting. For the life of me, I could not come up with anything else (that excited me) to occur in the foreground. I had part of the background and the main focal point image of the foreground. Since I didn’t do a good job of laying out the complete image, I basically re-designed the background to fit the foreground.

What I should have done was decide in step 2 what exactly was actually going to occur in the foreground. Instead, I left it up to chance. In retrospect, I think I was hoping for divine inspiration to occur while I was detailing the ship. I can’t speak for all artists, but sometimes we creative types forget, or subconsciously want are art to be a free flowing experience. We don’t want it to be work but in reality art is usually 90% tedious work, with the fun 10% occurring at the beginning conceptual stages of the project.

Step seven and eight, the fix. Since I could not get the whole picture to lay out how I wanted it to, I went back to the drawing board.

First, I decided to change the background all together. I found a Hubble telescope image for photo reference and began painting a new background in Painter. Once the background was complete, I decided to make my life simple and lay out the image in a prepackaged contextual format. I did this by creating a text layer on top of my image and laid the image out like a magazine or book (see the step 8 image). Anything I did from now on had to fit into that context. Basically, that freed me up to further analyze and fix the painting.

I then needed to figure out where the ship was going to go. The current design was not working for me so I decided to change it. I went back to one of my previous files that I thankfully saved, and cut the ship into three or four pieces, reconfigured it, painting over the cut points so everything looks seamless. For the most part I was able to save most of the previous detail work. I believe I did have to repaint a couple of parts. With the ship done, and the extreme background done, I needed something else in-between. Planets seemed the obvious choice, so I put a couple of those in–careful to make sure everything was working in the contextual format that I had established.

Pretty much after that, everything came together quickly. The lesson learned is (the frustrating part is I already know this lesson, I just didn’t think I needed to follow it), if I would have just followed my own prior experience and training, I could have avoided a lot of extra work on this project. Hey Chris, know what? Don’t reinvent the wheel, just follow the process.