Painting Raged Ravan - Part 1

• Software: GIMP
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Raged (or angry) Ravan

This is one of my projects that is going on, and I am pretty pleased with the outcome of it to this point.

I was commissioned to do a scene from Ramayan, a specific scene called Sitapaharana - ‘kidnapping of Sita’. For those not acquainted with the Indian mythology Ramayan, the scene has Sita, Ravan, and Jhatayu in it. It is a dramatic scene where Ravan has kidnapped Sita, Rama’s wife, and is en route back to his kingdom of Lanka on a vehicle capable of flight. He is confronted by the ‘bird man’ Jhatayu and in the battle Ravan chops his wings off. I had to do an oil painting of the scene.

I have tried a couple of paintings in oil medium before, but this was a challenging task as I am not well practiced in depicting characters. So, I started doodling in GIMP, and one of the sketch is evolving into a digital painting on its own.

After I had practiced and laid out the basic anatomy, the initial painting and rendering the major volume came quite easy.

Usually, I would leave my works at this stage, and call it finished. But since I was enjoying working on this piece, I wanted to push a little more and started to detail.

Detailing the ornaments and his other gear is turning out to be quite time consuming. But this is giving me a good practice and helping me study the effect of light on glossy and highly reflective material. The shadows are pretty dark and sharp, and so are the highlights. It is not looking perfect now, but with few more practice like on this one, I think I should be able to render glossy materials better in future works.

This will take still more of my effort since I have started putting in an extra level of detail.

Keep yourself updated by subscribing to KalaaLog.com feeds, or if you want a more up to date information on this project, check out the Raged Ravan thread at CGPainting.com.