Top tutorials

Checking the site statistics, it looks like there are two tutorials that have a lot of visits, mostly due to other sites linking to the tutorials. The top tutorial posts have been in both the vector as well as digital painting topics.

1. Illustrate Hibiscus Flower
2. Painting A Peacock

Most notable site is the Inkscape Tutorials blog, that regularly links to vector or illustration related tutorials here. Thanks Ryan, for the link love. I urge those interested in Inkscape to have a look at that blog - it regularly posts links to great Inkscape related tutorials.

Tutorial Index

The tutorial index page (the link the navigation bar above), has been updated to link to all the different tutorials posted here. I have tried to organize it under broad categories like illustration, painting and general sketching tutorials. From the last update, 40 new links have been added to the lists.

Tags

As can be seen on the tutorials page, the number of tutorials has grown quite large. It might soon be harder to search for a specific set of tutorials. This is the reason, and also due to reader request, I went through each and every tutorial posted here and tagged them as either ‘vector’ or ‘painting’, and also as either ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate’, or ‘advanced’. You can browse the tutorials using the tag cloud (on the right hand sidebar), or by directly putting in /tag at the end of http://kalaalog.com URL. If you are adventurous, then you can use plus (+) and comma (-) to apply AND or OR respectively.

Here are some examples:

• http://kalaalog.com/tag/advanced/ - This lists all the tutorials tagged as ‘advanced’
• http://kalaalog.com/tag/vector/ - This lists all the tutorials tagged as ‘vector’
• http://kalaalog.com/tag/video+intermediate+painting/ - List of intermediate level painting video tutorials

The tags, categories and the search should make it easier to zero in on a particular tutorial. But I am still trying to find some easier way to explore the tutorials. It may involve making use of external tagging/bookmarking services like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.com so that readers can themselves tag it as they see fit.

Any suggestions are welcome - use the comment area below!

I have been knocking around a bit with this for a while, and that was the reason you are not seeing any posting earlier today on Sunday, as I had declared about a year back regarding frequency of posts. Of course, when I started this blog, I was thinking of updating it only once a week. But somewhere along the line, I enjoyed it so much that I have been posting regularly on Thursday and Sunday 12:00 GMT. This would continue to be so, in spite of this break in schedule this week.

Please do not hesitate to use the comment form below to indicate anything wrong you might see here. And do not hesitate to put other comments either.

The tutorials range from general sketching, digital painting (raster graphics) and digital illustration (vector graphics). I have grouped them in this fashion for now, but I am sure I will need to revisit it as more tutorials get added - I plan to keep learning as much as I can, and share whenever it can be explained with a group of images and text.

I will be posting other reviews, my own artworks, and interviews of other artists, but looking at the site statistics, it seems like tutorials are the most popular ones.

That said, I would like to know your feedback. What kind of tutorials would you like to see?

Should focus be more on general visual artform - focused on sketching/drawing/painting of course?

Would you like more on digital painting tutorials or vector tutorials?

Please let me know in the comment section below.

Top Vector Art Tutorials At KalaaLog.com

• How To Draw Peacock Feather
• 10 Step Crystal Orb Tutorial

Top Raster Art Tutorials At KalaaLog.com

• How To Paint Tomato
• How To Paint Leaf

These are also the ones that got good responses.

But do let me know, if there is a specific subject or more that you would like to learn doing it as an artwork.  There is only so much I can know from these statistics - because they are just that - statistics.

So, do let me know.

• How To Paint Tomato
• Digtial Painting

Veerle’s Blog

Veerle Douh is a graphic/web designer living in Belgium.  Her artworks are amazing, especially the vector artworks.  She also does interviews of other artists from around th globe.

Art & Stuff

This is a blog by Susan Borgas.  She is an Australian artist.  She works on oil paintings and pastel medium, and also does photography.

Visit and add their feeds to your feed readers.

I intended to style KalaaLog in a sort of evolutionary way, and thus, I would be adding elements to it one after another. And having a logo was one of the first things that had to be done after the set up of the blog using the Wordpress engine.

After a couple of hours of work using Inkscape it is finally done.

I did not use a specific process in creating this logo as I am not formally trained in any design course, so if the process not a common approach, I would be glad to get some insights from you.

Here is how I went about creating the logo for KalaaLog.

To begin with, I wanted to look out for a font that had an artistic taste. After going through the standard set of Serif fonts, it seemed that KalaaLog required something along the Sans-Serif lines and yet be artistic. Browsing through the various fonts available at dafont, I came across Dream Orphans.

Dream Orphans is a nice Sans-Serif font provided by Larabie Fonts that has nice artistic touch to the typographical elements of the fonts.

Once the font face was finalized, I went about styling it a bit more, to have the ‘art’ element in it.

The bottom curve of ‘g’ in KalaaLog dropped below the line that the bottom parts of the other letters made.  I drew up this imaginary line to a solid line and then stroked out another artistic curve along the curve of g.

Then it was adding the artistic-flora element at the two ends to finalize the logo.  Both of them were derived from a basic set of strokes that was inspired from various similar artistic works.

I used them all together, and since it was in vector format, I scaled it to the desired dimensions, and hooked it into the header.

KalaaLog has a logo now.

How did you create your logo?

Readers seem to like the regularity in the post frequency, and that is what I would be trying to do here at KalaaLog. I would be posting regularly one post per week, every Sunday at 12:00 GMT. And as with Splat, I might post other posts on any other day as and when the need arises (for example, this post in itself falls under such category).

Hence, as of now, expect one post per week at KalaaLog. Since the subject of this blog is more timeless in nature, and it requires considerable effort on each post, I will be keeping it as one post per week as of now. Depending on the response, and resources (in terms of time and money) that I get to allot on Kalaalog, it may increase in future. But any such changes would be updated so that you readers can know about these ‘behind the curtain’ changes.

Even though I am a non-beliver, I still am an artist nevertheless. And I am an artist from India, where it is customary to start anything taking the name of Ganesha.

He is also called Vighnesh - which means, one who has conqured all troubles. It is his name we take with the hopes that the work we do is hindered by any kind of troubles. Ganesha, and the elephant headed god, surpasses the barrier of religion and is recognized by all, at least in terms of collectibles.

KalaaLog will be about arts, for that is what Kalaa means in Indian langauges. It means art. I will be posting titbits about the arts in its various forms, and most of them would be from an Indian perspective.

I have just setup this blog, and it will take few days before I start writing regularly here, as I have a little more things left on the to-do list. But here it goes.

KalaLog starts in the name of Ganesha.