"The Space Pimple"

So, I decided to take another class at KVCC this semester to get the creative juices flowing again- and to learn how to use Corel Painter.

Our first assignment was a Spot Illustration of a topic that grew organically in class. People threw out ideas, and we slowly narrowed it down to a Space Ship. Then it had to have features; how about guns, and a bumper sticker. Spaceballs anyone? Anyway. That was the assignment. Draw a Space Ship, with guns and a bumper sticker, in any media you want. I chose to do an illustration in Photoshop, because I haven't done much "painting" there and thought it would be a good challenge.

Clicking on any of the images will open up a larger photo!

So, I started off with the guns. After free-drawing a little, I decided on trying a turret idea.



From there, I needed to get the form of the ship down. During class I did some thumbnails and decided I wanted to do a spherical ship with guns pointing off every-which-way. So, blocking this in with the turrets was easy.



For those of you who know about Katamari Damacy? Yea, I stopped for awhile and giggled. Moving on!

Time to start laying in the colors and getting a feel for this sucker.



Alright, not bad.. not bad. Not fantastic as of yet; but what drawing is at the beginning? Smoothing out the base color and adding background something came next.



Still very flat. About this time is when I decided that the little dots looked like pimples, which is how it became known as "The Space Pimple". I also went in and cleaned up the lines; they were too thick and looked messy. So, once they were done and shadow was added... I had this!



Depth it received. As well as a good jolt of color. The guns weren't working for me, though, so I took all of them out and redrew them. The smaller dots needed to become windows, and the local color needed some re-establishing after all that blue shadow.



Something was just still not right. After a bit of a break, it hit me! Space ships aren't usually one big piece of smooth metal.



Now, you may be wondering where the bumper sticker is? That was the last thing I added! For this next, and final piece, I did some subtle shading on each of the metal plates to give them a slight distinction, as well as cleaned out my palette from the background. This is what I presented to the class, and what I'm still very happy with! When I feel ambitious; I plan to go in and re-work the actual guns one more time. Right now they look like brass cannons, which is funny- but not very ominous. Making them a bit more threatening would help define the irony between the ship covered in guns that has a "Peace" bumper sticker!