Snowball is a Demonlord from the Eternal Seven story.

This pencil drawing took about 5 hours to complete.

I started out planning on making a scene with Medusa and a petrified (stone statue) human but as I was drawing it dawned on me… what if the guy was blinded, with eyes stitched shut. And from there the story formed in my head.

This drawing was not referenced at all. A digital painting might be coming soon.

Over the last year I invested quite a bit of time into learning about Linux, giving multiple distributions a try, and suffering through the learning process. I’ve come to the conclusion that Linux is great for two types of users: the clueless ones who just browse the net, and the super high tech users. The people for whom Linux is NOT a good option are the middle skilled users, most notably gamers! These are the users who are familiar with Windows and expect Linux to work out of the box in the same way Windows does. Anyways, I want to focus on GIMP in this article, as it is one of the applications which most of the bigger distributions will install automatically.

GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program is one of the open source alternatives to Photoshop. GIMP is available for Windows but unlike Photoshop it is available for Linux! While this application is not as powerful as Adobe’s industry standard for graphics GIMP will surprise the uninitiated with the raw number of features already implemented in it. Most importantly for people who cannot afford to pay Photoshop’s high ticket price GIMP is definitely worth looking at and you have to try it! Here is a 1 hour sketch I made in GIMP while testing out my tablet under Linux:

So here is a small list of the features which is currently available in GIMP:

• Brushes with pressure sensitivity linkable to opacity or size!
• Texture brushes – .abr (Photoshop brush files) can be imported though many features don’t work yet.
• Blending modes such as Hard/Soft Light available in Photoshop are also in GIMP
• Layers!!!

Here is a screenshot of my desktop showing GIMP in use: GIMP Screenshot. On the left side I’ve parked the main tool selection pallete and on the right you can see a bunch of the other windows which I usually pull up in Photoshop such as the color chooser, the history, the layers and etc.

While the interface isn’t identical to the one used by Photoshop most users won’t have trouble locating basic functions which they use in Photoshop. The user interface is constantly being upgraded with each successive revision of GIMP and some major changes are expected with the 2.5 release which is currently being developed. Considering this is a freely available application I cannot say enough good things about it! Give it a shot and love it!

One thing is for sure, Linux has grown up and is now a very viable alternative to Windows and GIMP is awesome!

This is a pinup style drawing of a lovely nude faerie, the way all faeries should be portrayed!

Below is a detailed shot of the face, I painted the eyes digitally after scanning the image.

Once again special thanks to Darkchild for the helpful pointers on fixing the wings positioning.

Here is a pencil drawing I made over the last few weeks, actually I started the drawing a while back and finally got around to finishing it recently.

Another dragon attack, another brave hunter attempts to kill the beast.

Yes, dragons roam free in the Eternal Seven world, there’s little good to them though. The bigger the beasts grow the more of a menace they become to the other inhabitants of this world, and they never stop growing… They are extremely difficult to slay though there are hunters who seem to have a … knack for it.

About this drawing: This image started as a quick pencil sketch which I liked enough to scan. Recently as I was browsing my old files and cleaning up stuff when I decided to flesh this out and color it. It took about 3 hours of work in Photoshop to get it to this stage, the pencil sketch is really not even worth showing. Also I cropped the image because I wasn’t happy about the rest of the wings but this detailed shot turned out to be pretty good.

Here is another figure study of another fabulous fitness model: Jelena Abbou.

This image is all digital and I used a photograph (not nude) as a reference. I would also like to share the actual sculpt next – 99% of the work goes into the following image:

Special thanks to Darkchild for giving me some good crits on this image related to the size of the hands. This took about 3 hours to create.