Illustration November 23, 2010

Its been a while since the last illustration entry. Hopefully the wait will be worth it. I must be the slowest illustrator in the world. I finally set a real deadline for myself. I'm going to have this thing finished by the middle of December so I can have a framed image for my wife by Christmas.As you can see below I have made an incredible amount of progress in the past two months. I spent a great deal of time on his face. I am still not quite satisfied with it, but it is a decent likeness of my second son.
What is becoming an increasingly attractive style for me is placing incredible detail where I want the viewer to see detail. the purpose being to direct a persons view to what is most important. Also, to emphasise his personality in every detail of his face. Much of his clothing I have done very loosely, but his face I have made an attempt at exact clarity. At this point it still feels imperfect. That is the way of learning as an artist. I realize more than ever that I have a long way to go in perfecting my style and technique. So I will be satisfied with this current illustration and move on, make my next on e even better. Please read on to find out more about my techniques for this illustration.



The piano
I am very pleased with the overall feel of the piano and its keys. I was able to pull off a nice shiny surface. A big part of my technique involved altering the shape of the edit brush in the brushes palette to a semi-soft rectangle. I dabbed this along the surface of the piano, rotating between darks and lights until I got the affect I was looking for.

coloring my painting
As you can see in the above image I have begun experimenting with using layer modes to colorize my grayscale image. It has proved to be more challenging than I first thought. I started by creating a transparent layer above the grayscale layer. I painted in some red and a skin colored tint. Then I shifted through every single layer mode until I found one that worked the best. In this case I believe it was the mode 'Overlay'. My colors were too intense though, so I've been messing with different opacities to get the colors just right. It isn't very easy. I may not use this technique in the future. Instead I will use straight colors. It will be a little more traditional than what I'm doing here

A New artist brush
As a bonus for this particular blog I am providing a brush I created. It mimics as closley as I have ever seen in gimp, a fine artist brush. If your using a mouse turn on the fade in the Brush options. Then reduce the Brush spacing at the bottom of the brush palette to 1 or 2.0. If your using a pen tablet Do the above with the addition of turning on opacity and size by pen pressure in the brush dynamics in the Brush options. As you can see below, (Click on the image) this particular brush has a nice artsy, painterly affect.
To get this brush simply click on the image of the brush below, save to desktop, open in gimp, then save as a .gih file type into your gimp brushes folder. I don't normally give away my own brushes. But this is the giving time of year. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Holidays!!!