Now that I’ve finished the design on my new blog (as simplistic as it might be), it’s time to start working on the next post. The part that took me the longest really was the little graphic up in the corner of the page. I rarely get a chance to practice my artistic skills anymore and I wanted a little avatar of myself to logo my relaunch of this blog. So I set down and spent a couple of hours in GIMP, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program and scribble it out. GIMP is an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop with a catalog of tools that are overkill for such a simple little image. But I saw it as an opportunity to brush up on my skills and create another tutorial.
From a former art major, digital imaging is a strange beast when compared to your ink pens and paint brushes. I feel it’s much closer to sculpting. Though your final product is a flat image, you are continuously zooming in and out of your image and moving through multiple levels of the image. So much so you could find yourself getting lost within the image. By doing so you can put a stroke in the wrong place and ruin the image, but that’s why we have undo and the save command. Both of which you should be doing often.
When doing computer graphics you should relieve yourself of any notion of it being working like pen and paper, except just on a big screen. Forget it. You are working in 3-D and layers are key. I work by putting each part of the image on a different layer. It may be a bit of a hassle at first flipping between all the layers when working, but the benefits are invaluable. A mistake doesn’t mean starting a whole image over, just the layer. You are aloud to make layers appear and disappear making for easy comparison if you aren’t certain what direction you want to take the image. They operate very easily once you get the hang of them, they just stack on top of each other like clear pieces of glass. The image below is when I was nearly finished and you can see how many layers I was up to at that point.
I started the image with what I was familiar with, pencil and paper. I drew a sketch like almost any artist would to put his ideas down on paper. Whats I had the basic idea of what I was going for down on paper, I took a picture. A scanner would work just as well in this case but I didn’t have one readily available. Besides, I didn’t need it to be perfect, I just needed to get it into the computer and my digital camera was handy.
My first task was to lay out the line work. The pen tool is the best method for this, though it may be a little tricky to work with at first. My first thought was “Oh, a pen, I’ve used those, I know how they work. Not quite the same here. With the pen tool you are creating arcs. That ends up being pretty useful because all your lines end up being nice and smooth and you don’t have to worry about keeping your hand steady with the mouse. You create these anchor points as you click. If you hold down the click and move the mouse, little arms grow out the side of the anchor point. When you click the second point you’ll see the arch form between the two anchors. Each arm adjusts the angle of the arch at each point. The second arm on each point adjust the angle on the next arch that you create. Once you get use to using the pen tool it feels like you are creating connect-the-dots as you go.
Once you’ve mapped out a path on your image and you want to make a line for it, click the “Stroke Path” button on the tool box. You’ll get a dialog box like the one below that lets you define how thick a line you want to lay down. I prefer using the “Stroke with paint tool” option. That will use whatever settings I have currently for the paint brush tool. I think it gives you a smoother stroke.
Use this technique to draw out all the lines to your image, using a separate layer for each object on the page. If possible, try to make closed shapes because it will make it much easier to color. At least with a simple image like I did here.
When adding color all I had to do was use the magic wand tool and select the face section. I created another layer for coloring the face and the selection I made follows me to the new layer. Then it was a simple matter of using the paint bucket tool to drop in some flesh tones for the face.
Keeping the face selected I gave my paint brush a broad brush size, selected a shadowy flesh color, and again used the line tool to put in some shading. Because I kept the selection I had made from the magic wand tool, I can go outside of the lines of my image and the computer keeps me from scribbling on the rest of the picture. I with the broad brush stroke I just needed part of the arc to be with the selected area and I didn’t have to worry about being super accurate.
That’s basically how I did it. Using those same techniques I moved from the image, painting the head, arm, body, laptop. I essentially just repeated the same steps each time. Create yourself an interesting background and viola!
Get creative with the tools at your disposal. Play with them and see what they do. Get comfortable with them and try to think of new ways to use them.
Remember to safe often. GIMP’s native file format will save all your layers and work. The file will be rather large, but graphics aren’t the time to be stingy. You want to create giant images that take up lots of memory and use lots of layers. That’s why heavy duty computers are so useful when doing this kind of thing. You’ll shrink things down at the end when you make your final presentation. The great part is that it will hide all the flaws you made and make the image look crisp and clean.
