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.

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.