Seal of the Realms - Collab

For the last few days me and my husband James worked on coloring a piece of lineart he created in his AutoCAD 2012 Fall semester class.  It's called the Seal of the Realms, and is a symbol that appears in a series of fantasy stories he wishes to write.  There's tons of symbolism in it in regards to the series, but I won't delve into it on this blog.  With his permission, I am sharing this artwork with you today.

What's so cool about this piece was the fact that he used an architectural drafting program to create a work of fantasy art.  Because of the precision of AutoCAD, the entire work is very precise as well and was not hand drawn.  Any flukes in the line art is due to me trying to put together two scanned halves of the circle in GIMP.  James lost his flash drive that had the original file on it, otherwise we would have just transferred an original .jpg file from the drive to GIMP.  The original paper was folded in half, so some of the ink down the center of Seal circles was lost; I had to draw missing lines in.  I did an alright job.

I learned a few things while coloring this piece for him.  First that I really like the Cut option.  Second, I used a lot of the elliptical selection option.  When coloring in the circular parts, I started at the center circle space and created a selection from it.  As I moved outward and created more circular selections, I would go back to the previous selection and cut out the fill/gradient I didn't need.  That's how I got the thinner golden and silver circles around the piece, as well as how I kept the letter circles transparent.

I actually started coloring this piece earlier this year.  I did the glow effects around the lettering and the grungy stone  background.  However, due to the complexity of the image's coloring, I wanted to do this with my husband and get the coloring done to his specifications.  

Needless to say, it turned out really cool.