In this post I’ll show how to create a fantasy illustration in Gimp. We’ll design a (rather sexy) fairy.

Before we start:
One general info about pasting anything in Gimp.
To paste something into new layer, please use the general method (that is – ctrl+c, ctrl+v) – and after that click “new layer” icon to make a new layer from Floating Selection.

Ok – so we’ll make the background first. As the base I used a image of old paper.

We crop it to some smaller size.

And than we add some gradient (on new layer). We change the layer mode to multiply.

Great – now we can move to our fairy.
We’ll start with a model image.

We paste it to new layer (and make a copy straight away).

With Pen tool we speparate the image from the background. We can leave the places with hair for now.

For cutting out the hair – we can use the technique described here.

Ok – we have the girl separated from the background.
We put the separated image on the upper layer and the whole model image on the bottom layer.
We change bottom layer mode to multiply. (We’ll get a shadow from the bottom layer)

We’ll add fairy wings right now – we’ll get them from the butterfly image.

We make two layers from the butterfly image and we cut out the wings with the Pen tool.

We put the wings on layer above the fairy.
We change wings alpha to 80% and boost color a little with curves tools.

We need to cut out some part of the image – so it looks more realistic. We make the layers almost transparent (like 40-50%) – and we cut out some part of wings accordingly to fairy hair.

We can also add some shadow on girl’s back. On new layer (between wings and the girl) we draw a shape of the shadow with a Pen. We fill it with black color, add some gaussian blur (like 10-20px) and we make alpha aprox. 60%.

We draw a shadow of the wings in the same way (maybe make the alpha a little less).

We add some fantasy swirls (made with this brush.)

Fairy should have more vivid hair color – let’s make it green.
To do this we add green layer above the hair layer. Than we mask the layer in the same way that we used for seperating hair. Than we make the layer semi-transparent and change it’s mode to “overlay”.

I decided to change the background at that time.
I change old paper to beige gradient.

I’ve also add generated fog (with build-in filter).

Now some finishing steps.
I’ve added some red hair and some more swirls. In the background I’ve made some leafes made with dynamic brush Vine (comes with Gimp).

We change the leaf layer to mask – and mask yellow-red gradient with it.

On new layer we add some more leaves and again make it a mask for a gradient.

Withe Sparks brush (also comes with Gimp) we add some… sparks;)

The last step is to add some grunge elements to the background (with this brush.)

And that’s it – we have it done:)
(click on the image below to enlarge it)

If you would like to check how the .xcf file is build – you can download it here.

The illustration is released under Creative Commons licence – you can use it for private or commercials projects.