This tutorial is a short one, but would be explaining an intermediate level of digital painting technique. It is a walkthrough of painting a lightning against a moderately dark plain sky. Once you understand the technique, you should be able to apply the same technique for painting variations in the subject - sparkles, energy beams, or light sabers.

When painting a glowing energy streak - remember to choose a color palette that is contrasting in terms of value. You may want to choose contrasting color too to help in composition of the piece but may not be always possible (it would be weird to draw a blue colored flame).

For this example, I used a moderately dark blue for the sky. It is just not possible to get the right effect of a lightning against a white background.

This step might seem a bit counter-intutive. Use a soft edged round brush, take a color even darker than the background and paint over the area roughly where you would be painting the lightning. Even it the lighting seems to glow, to achieve a bright effect, putting an even darker background helps achieve the contrast.

The next few steps are just about taking smaller brushes each time and taking a step towards the bright lighting color through the palette. (You can even create another small image and mix up the sky and the lightning color to get the different shades).

You can see here I have started painting with a yet smaller brush. The screenshot is when I finished doing it only partially so you can see the difference.

Since it is lightning you are painting, you do not need to draw steady lines. You do not even need to keep the subsequent lines exactly in the middle of the earlier lines you have drawn. A different subject, say a engergy beam might require more steady hand.

Here, I have painted, what one would call the ‘white hot’ areas. Do not choose white, but some thing really pale should do the trick.

As I mentioned before, you can use this technique to paint any variations of this subject. You can even translate the technique to different styles of digital painting. For example, I did the same subject, but using ‘cut-edge style shading‘.

Do post the results of your works that you did using this technique in the comments below.

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Dedicated to the lives lost, those of the civilians and the public service personnel like policemen, firemen and armed forces of India, in the Mumbai attacks of 26 November.

An A4 size painting at 300 dpi in portrait layout, done using GIMP and Wacom Intuos3. Check out the deviantART entry - Mumbai Firemen - for a larger view.

• Software: Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Peacock

Peacock Workshop: Standing Peacock | Dancing Peacock | Painting Peacock | Vector Peacock | More …

In this tutorial, we would do a walkthrough of illustrating a vector artwork of a peacock. Much of the techniques mentioned in the other peacock tutorials here would be used.

Drawing

I used GIMP to do a rough work, but you can use any other tool that you find comfortable sketching. See Drawing A Standing Peacock for a detailed tutorial.

After we get the form of the peacock, a little work on the details is done to get the idea of how much detail we want to put into the vector artwork in the end.

Basic Form

At this point in time, I import the PNG file into Inkscape and get the rough outline form of the peacock. If you had done the sketch/lineart on paper, you can scan it in using a scanner and import into Inkscpae.

Make further shapes, to block out the different areas and depth using the lineart as a guide. Take extra care to layer them from back to front. A little bit of planning goes a long way when the amount of detailing is going to be quite complex.

The blue outlines are at the same level. The green outlines, three of them are layered one over the other.

Plumage

After giving some basic flat color and gradient to the whole body, zoom in towards the center and use the pen tool to draw details of the plumage.

Further apply gradients to these detail shapes. If the form feels flat, create shapes of lighter blue color and change opacity to 10% or 20%.

Head and Beak

Apply gradients to the blue outlines with a pale yellow-brown color and you get the head detailed.

There is no need to give a lot of attention to this part, as the area is quite small. In full view, much of the details would be lost.

He looks a bald due to lack of the crown feathers - we will be adding that later.

Feathers

Now we get to the identifying feature of a peacock - his exhuberent feathers. Have a look at Peacock Feather Vector Art post that has a detailed walkthrough on creating vector art of a single feather - we will not be going to that amount of detail, but it helps to know.

As mentioned above in the basic form, this particular angle has three layers of the feathers. Start with the lowest layer.

Get the basic shape fo the feathers end that looks like an exotic eye. Concentric blob like shapes, with colors ochre (yellow), orange, cyan and deep blue will be the template.

Reduce the opacity of this to around 20%. Since it is the lowest layer of feather, we make it dull by reducity the opacity (increasing the transparency). You do not need to draw them all, just make copies of them, rotate and scale to get them in the required positions.

Its feathers have sparkling highlights. Even on the lowest layer, they would be visible. Use the pen tool to mark out couple of these in each section.

You can even put in some stray strands of the feathers and merge them with the main shape, to give volume to each layer of feather.  Thsi makes it look less flat.

Cut (not copy) and paste in place the remaining green outlines and start detailing the same way as you did the earlier layer. Make those eye like shapes 40% opaque this time.

Take a little more time when doing the upper layer. Add darker shadows to make the highlights standout more than the other. Increase the opacity of the circular patter to around 60%.

Finishing Details

Draw a couple of the crown plumage. Make copies to create the full set.

For the rest of the body, add some stark highlight shapes.

You can download this artwork as a desktop background over at ClipArtLog.com - Peacock Wallpaper.

If you liked this tutorial, pass on the link to your friends. Subscribe to KalaaLog.com feeds to get updates on new posts. (You can get email updates too - use the subscription form above).

It can be quite daunting and for those of us who are modest, it may see feel narcissistic. But trust me - I just tried it out. It is a challenging task yet a good creative exercise. As an artist, when you are trying to portray realism to the faintest extent, you would want to be able to capture what is called familiarity. Even when the ‘portraits’ of people (or even things) are distorted like in caricatures (see Tom Richmond’s works for example), the key is to capture the familiarity.

We have been observing ourselves from the day we became self aware. There will be very few who have not noticed some of the features of themselves in the mirror. A Self Portrait is just an attempt to capture the familiarity of oneself.

Here is my first attempt at a self portrait. I believe I have caught some of my features - I can see a lot of changes required, but I am going to let this one slide. I would do more attempts in future.

This was done in GIMP, using Wacom Intuos3, over a span of roughly 15 mintues. Before attempting this, I just peeked at myself on mirror, and tried to take a mental note of the features. After that, I opened up an new canvas in portrait layout and started with a new dull brown layer. This seems to be a better approach than face a blank white canvas. Then, I started out with rough form and kept refining it on new layers - going through with a smaller brush each time.

• Software: Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Genie Lamp

By the end of this tutorial, you would be able to create a vector artwork of a Genie Lamp. You should be familiar with the tools of Inkscape or any of the other vector editor you use (like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw).

Base Shape

Use the ellipse drawing tool and create two of them one below the other and overlapping. Align them so that their centers are exactly above each other. The blue ellipse is the base shape of the main lamp body. The red one would become the stand of the lamp. Create two more ellipses (green) on either side of the red one. Use the subtract operation to chop of this area from the red ellipse to get the base shape.

Use the pen tool to create a roughly trianglular shape on the left (or right - your choice). Note that the tip of the triangle pointing outside has been chopped off and it is actually a four sided polygon (green). Use the node edit tool to curve them as shown above.

Create two more smaller, concentric ellipses and tilt them a bit. Subtract the inner ellipse from the outer.

Position it to the right (or left), opposite to the curved triangular shape.

Base Color

Make a copy of all the shapes you created and paste it exactly over the original. With the new set of shapes still selected, perform the union operation. This creates a single shape. Layer it to the back of all the original shapes (use Page Down or End in Inkscape) and give it a very dark brown fill and stroke color. A dark brown has a good harmony with the yellow metal color we will be using.

Increase the stroke width to around 3 to 5, so that it bleeds around the original shapes. This will give it a nice thick outline when we are done.

Now start filling all the four original shapes with the yellow color. Before turning the outline/stroke off, you should be ordering the shapes as shown above. Once you are done, give it a basic shading.

Ensure that you have turned off the outline before proceeding with the shading. Once you start shading, it can be a bit of paint to turn them off later. The process of giving the basic shading is something as follows.

1. Make a copy of the basic shape
2. Paste it exactly over the original. Use [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[v] in Inkscape.
3. Give the copy a darker brown color
4. Use the gradient tool (or format color option) to give it a gradient

Details

Once the base shape, color and shading is done, you can start detailing. Let the creativity take over - I went for a minimal approach to make it easy to explain.

Take the pen tool and out line the intricate pattern as a contour of the shadow area. Use the pen tool to create the shape and adjust using the node edit tool.

Switch off the stroke/outline of this shape and give it the outline color. Reduce the opacity to around 50%.

You can go over this process any number of times adding details. Draw the new shape and then apply a union operation with the other to give it a uniform coloring/opacity.

I added some glossy highlights by creating some blob like shapes, and giving it a whitish-yellow color.

As I said, let the detailing be guided by your creativity. Do post links to your works that you did with the help of this tutorial below.

If this tutorial helped you, subscribe to KalaaLog.com feeds (or use the email subscription form) if you have not done already - there will be more tutorials.

This tutorial should get you going on drawing horses - the head specifically.

You should be able to reproduce the results either digitally or using pencil, pen, paper and a good eraser. If you would like to study the results, you can download it at the end of this tutorial.

Basic Shape

First, try to imagine and breakdown the seemingly complicated head of the horse. You will notice that it is sphere for the head, a cylindrical protruding to the muzzle and another much smaller sphere for that area. On the profile view, it becomes circles and a cylinder. The neck too is a cylindar and on profile, it would become a rectangle - but to make it interesting, I twisted it a bit.

With the guide in your minds eye, draw these rough shapes to gain confidence before moving on to actual sketching.

When you are drawing this on paper, try to make the rough lines as light as possible. If you are doing this in a graphics editor - and it provides layers (like GIMP and Photoshop do), do not worry about the intensity/darkness of the lines. For the next step, start in a layer over this and reduce the opacity of the rough layer.

Sketch

Before proceeding with the sketchcing, observe some of the details that make up the feature of the hourse. The muzzle has a hemi-sperical shape and when it opens its mouth, there is a distict profile silhoutte. The forehead has a bump and the strong jaw muscle causes a bulge on the underside of the head near the neck joint. Do not forget the mane that runs down the back of the neck from behind its ears.

With the above details in mind, start sketching the outline and the details. Try to keep the flow of your strokes along the form of the horse’s head.

If you are doing this on pencil, you can do it a little darker than the rough, or you could switch to a softer (and hence darker) pencil like 2B or 4B.

Lineart

On paper, lightly erase the pencil lines and start drawing with a black pen.

If you are doing this digitally, switch to a new layer, and reduce opacity of the sketch layer. (You can turn off or delete the rough layer).

It may be difficult to give varying thickness to the lineart when done on paper, but going parallel to the already drawn lines and filling it up would do - be very careful when you are doing this. Like in the digital medium, you do not have an undo feature while using a pen.

In the digital medium, using the pressure sensitivity and a inking tool makes it real easy to create the lineart with varying thickness.

You can download the finished artwork and open it to see the different layers to see the progression.

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If you found this tutorial helpful, pass on the link to your friends or whoever you think might be intrested.

And do subscribe to KalaaLog.com feeds (or use the email subscription form) if you have not done already. I plan to write more such tutorials aimed at both beginner and intermediate levels.

I grossly under-estimated the amount of effort this would take.

With the amount of detail, and my choice of color palette - added to that the two sources of light, takes up quite a bit of effort to paint.

As you can see, I have approached this from back to front. And on each of those level/layer, I detail them with a fat/large brush to a fine/small brush.  Stay tuned - I will finsih up painting by detailing the two main characters, and perhaps adjusting some color levels.

Too late for Halloween, perhaps. But I really enjoyed working on this illustration.

After doodling with GIMP’s new inking tool, I had this urge to try it out. After some seasonal inspiration, and several concepts, roughs and sketches, I felt pretty confident to do a illustration over them. This was created completely using the Inking Tool of GIMP 2.6 and some use of the upgraded Selection Tool.

Visit the devaintART entry page if you want to try your hand at coloring this (do link back), or if you would like to see a larger image to see the details.

Too Old for Halloween? - Illustration

It was released quite some time back, and had installed it on my Windows boot. But I had been lazy to install it on my Ubuntu boot where I usually work. The Ubuntu 8.04 did not have a backport of the latest GIMP 2.6 - and since it was not available through Synaptic Package Manager, I just waited a bit for Ubuntu 8.10 to be released on October 30.

Layout

With the upgrade complete, the first thing I did was to check out the new layout. The menu strip from the tool box has been moved to a ‘placeholder’ window. When you select the ‘Keep windows on top’ for utility and dockable windows in the Preferences (Edit > Preferences > Window Management), the setup is quite uncluttered.

Frankly, I was used to the older layout and it does not make much of a difference. But some of you might find it handy if you keep shifting between different tools, to have the tool box always stay on top, and not be cluttered with menu items.

Brush Dynamics

The plesant surprise was when I selected the brush tool. Brush tool is the standard tool that you will use for doing digital paintings.

As you can see in the Brush Dynamics section, there are three sets of check boxes. The Pressure relates to what should vary based on the pressure of your graphics tablet. A usual setting I keep is to have the Opacity and Size of the brush be affected by the pressure. The improvement is the slider, situated at the end of the check boxes. This allows you to specify how much the pressure should effect the ones you have selected.

The next set of check-boxes is for the velocity - or how fast you move the tablet. I guess it would effect even the mouse movements. I see this go into simulating real world mediums like oil and water color.

The Random row, should help a lot while applying texture using custom brushes. The problem I have seen on using custom brushes is that the end result somehow seems unnatural due to repeated patterns. The randomness factor should remedy that issue.

Improved Select Tool

The freehand select tool has undergone major improvement. Do not let the name ‘freehand’ fool you. It allows you to do freehand as well as polygon select in the same selection action.

Allowing the polygon selection alone is a major improvement. Regular readers might remember the post on Path Tool in GIMP. This new feature almost makes the slightly round about method obsolete. You can even save a selection as Path by doing Select > To Path.

Path and selection construction became much easier, and that should allow you to construct those flats layer quite easily now.

Inking

Though, not actually digital ‘painting’, illustration and drawing is a prerequisite to better paintings.

Inking is a technique that you may often need to use to give that illustrative feel, or perhaps be required for inking a comic book.

For this purpose, I earlier used to set the Brush with pressure sensitivity on only size of the brush. Such inking would have lack of flow that you had to fix by going in with a hard-edge eraser. This process too is no more required.

There is this nifty inking tool that lets you create smooth strokes that responds realistically to the tablet pen’s movements. It even has tilt sensor (which I have not yet seemed to master it in Inkscape), that would make calligraphic illustration much more controlled.

There are a lot more ‘under the hood’ changes (like GEGL), that may not seem to make much difference to the end user (us) as of now. But I think, this is that first step GIMP needs to take to deliver more features. There are a lot more minor changes too - check out the GIMP 2.6 release notes.

For past couple of month, Chazlynne Deguair and I have been working on creating a website/blog dedicated to clipart. The drive for this was the great feedback and traffic driven at KalaaLog.com through searches containing “clipart” in them.

Chazlynne and I have been posting there regularly and it has more than 50 new clipart, available for download, free for personal and non-commercial uses.

Head over to ClipArtLog.com and do subscribe to its feeds. (You can subscribe for an email update too).