The Longevity Thesis Book Video

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Painting Caprio

Caprio, the God of Mischief in Jeanette Cottrell's novel The Shadebinder's Oath, is a little goat who "dips his cloven forehoof into serious affairs of mortals and stirs them up, just to see what happens." Jeanette is the lovely lady who puts out the Dragon Moon Press newsletter each month and promotes the rest of us, selflessly asking nothing in return. Because I'm very grateful to her, and because I really, really, really have fun using The GIMP (I love the GIMP, have I mentioned that? And consequently, I also have deep appreciation for all the open source programming Linux nerds out there), I made Jeanette a bookmark for inclusion in said newsletter (archives available).



I started out by Googling images of goats, and doing a composite sketch to make a mischievous looking prancing goat. The image I referenced the face from was a piebald little guy, however on seeing the base image, Jeanette told me Caprio was white, with a longer body and slightly shorter forelimbs.





















I'm not a professional artist, so I have a little trouble with proportions. But using the GIMP (such a lovely program) I quickly made these adjustments by selecting parts of the image and moving them around. I also cleaned up the image a bit and got rid of the piebald face.



















The next step was to add some light tones to the image. I overlayed a new transparent layer, and dotted on a few new colours with the paintbrush tool, opacity set to 30%, and smudged them along the angles I wanted them.



















Another new transparent layer was added, and with the opacity set to around 60%, I dotted on some darker shades, again using the paintbrush, and also smudged them in where I wanted them. I finally flattened the image and erased the surrounding regions to transparency so that I could overlay the goat onto the background template with all the juicy Dragon Moon logos and book information, etc.
















And here is the final product!!! Jeanette and I were both very happy with how it turned out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love the step by step sketches!! That is so cool!*

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*I'd use better adjectives but I'm tired.

Nina Munteanu said...

Very neat! I like how you showed the stages, Jennifer! You're a great artist!