From Sketch to Digital

Below is a simple pen drawing, the first phase of a long but rewarding process. Normally I would have scanned it, but with limited resources at the present time I took a picture of it with my Fujifilm Finepix S4200. The unbalance in lighting isn't ideal, like the dark mass at the bottom and the radiance between the upper and middle ships, but it didn't matter in the end.

Next, I put it through PicMonkey, turning up the brightness and the shadows in such a way that I got an almost black and white version. I then put it into MS Paint (primitive and old school to some but extremely effective and quick to me), and paled down the whole shape until all gray bits on the edges became nothing. Then I refilled all that was left in black. I follow that process for every piece on the Illustrations Page. After running back and forth with this process a few times, I got the shape below.

Next, I filled it in. Three or four minutely different shades of gold for the main ship and a strong electric blue for the moon in the background.

 

Desktop wallpapers modeled after this piece are available on the Desktop Wallpaper page for 1280x800 screen size and the iPhone 5.