Tutorials

• Software: Gimp (or Photoshop)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Kitar - Potion Assassin

After painting Anwun I felt like attempting another character design. So, here I made up another character.

Kitar, is an assassin from the same Order as Anwun. Assassin she might be, but her techniques are quite different. Her arsenal includes potions and powders and extracts of exotic herbs - for most part they aid her mates in the order, but she has used the same effectively in completing certain high profile missions.

With the basic idea sorted out, I went about doing some thumbnailing and selected one particular pose.

These are very small images, not more than 500 or 600 pixels high. At this point, more than detail, I am concerned with the overall structure of the pose of the character.
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• Software: Inkscape (or Illustrator)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Sword

This would be a cursory look at an approach to illustrating a sword. Remember that there are many types of swords, and hence, there are many ways you can approach its illustration.

The Blade

Draw a long rectangle, and then covert the object to path. (Path > Object to Path). After that, use the node edit tool. In Inkscape, you may need to delete the duplicated nodes at the corner. After that, bisect all the sides, so that you have eight nodes instead of four.

Delete off the bottom corners, and move the two mid nodes of the (earlier) vertical line further down towards the tip. You can leave it at this or make if more interesting by adding some more detail to the shape.

Curve the vertical lines inwards. Next, create a perfect square, and rotate it by 45 degrees.

Convert the square object to a path, and use the node edit tool to pull down the bottom corner node.
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• Software: Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Grapes

In this tutorial, you will look at the process of creating a vector illustration of grapes. Drawing grapes is quite easy - with all the oval shapes put together. Applying color renders on the other hand can become a bit tedious, and it helps to keep the color palette organized.

Lineart

Try drawing the grapes bunch in GIMP (or Adobe Photoshop) and get the general idea of the color palette with respect to the light source. Import it into your vector editor of choice (Inkscape or Illustrator).

You can download the above color study if you want: Grapes - Study (PNG format)

Reduce the opacity of the imported image to around 40% to 50% and use a polygon tool and mark out all the outline key points.

Using the node edit tool ( [F2] in Inkscape), shape the polygon tool exactly around the grapes bunch using the underlying image as a guide.

Draw another shape outlining all the inner shapes of the grape fruit. I drew them one by one using polygon tool and then performed a Union operation on them. It is show as a red line above but the color is not important as we will be making the stroke width zero after we apply the colors we want.

Flats

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• Software: GIMP (or Adobe Photoshop)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Potion Bottle

A potion bottle may seem like quite a complex thing to paint even for a simple shaped one due to all the reflections and colorful contents. But a pretty straigthforward workflow makes it easier.

Lineart and flats

Make use of extensive guide lines in a separate layer to get the shape of the bottle right. You could even use other tools like Inkscape - for now, I just went free hand.

You may imagine the potion bottle to be quite colorful with bright colors and think of using brighter colors as flats. But choose some dark value color - it is the contrast of the bright colors against the dark ones that makes it look colorful.

Painting back to front

The key to paintinig objects with transparency is to render them from back to front. Here, the far side glass is rendered first, and then the containing liquid and the cork.
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