Free Software on Raghukamath – Digital Painter and Freelance Illustrator from India

Setting up Debian Linux with Btrfs, KDE Plasma for a creative workstation

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 21:17:07 +0000

Hello Everyone 👋🏽, recently I distro-hopped to Debian Linux from Fedora Linux. And I thought I should write down all the steps that I did during this migration and installation of Debian to use it as my creative workstation. This can be of help for me in the future as a reference note and also for others. You can skip this introduction and jump right into the steps and get started.

Choice of Linux Distribution

A few years back I used Arch Linux and then I switched to Fedora. Arch was nice and it did not give me any trouble, but as I get old I am trying to save time here and there and spend it with my family and Arch requires some maintenance.

So I switched to Fedora and used it for roughly 2 years, but recently when a new change was made in Fedora, I was made aware by the community that I was unwise in my decision to choose it. I and probably other artists are not the target audience of Fedora, as it is a cutting/leading-edge distribution that may or may not be suited to be used as a production machine. Since Fedora’s mission includes “ Features, First” it means that it tries to adopt new technology and pushes the Linux desktop ahead to shake out bugs before anyone else! In my opinion, it is a beta testing distribution not meant to be used in a production environment for people other than developers. People do use it as a production machine, it is a subjective thing, but whenever an event or change in Fedora happens by which your workflow is affected many will gladly point this thing to you, as it was very graciously pointed out to me by many in the community.

Automatically updating nightly builds of Krita on Linux

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 03:39:23 +0000

When chatting on Krita IRC deevad mentioned that he uses a script to automatically download Krita nightly update and manage the launcher icons etc. So I thought that it is a cool idea to use script to automate the update process. Usually I used to click on the update button and then manually adjust the filename of the Appimage etc. I rename the files of appimage to stable and nightly respectively so that it becomes each to point them to a shortcut and there is no need to change the desktop shortcut file always. I already have two different desktop files to launch the nightly and stable Appimage version of Krita. The update done from the Krita’s welcome screen downloads a file with new file name and we have to either adjust the name in desktop file or rename the downloaded file.

When searching for a solution to automate this I found out about appimageupdatetool I believe this is the same tool that Krita uses in back-end to fetch the update. This tool has a GUI version and also a CLI version. I downloaded the CLI version which is named appimageupdatetool.

wget https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate/releases/download/continuous/appimageupdatetool-x86_64.AppImage -O ~/.local/bin/appimageupdatetool

The above command downloads the binary file of the tool to my computer’s local/bin folder. Make sure you have ~/.local/bin folder in your $PATH variable. I then mark it as executable with the following command.

Huion H610X Graphic Tablet - review and setup on Linux

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 06:10:45 +0000

Disclaimer: This post is not in any way sponsored by Huion or anyone related to them. All the things stated here are my opinions and your mileage may vary. I do not guarantee it will work for you the same way it worked flawlessly for me.

Recently I have been visiting my village house a lot and I have been trying to set up an alternate workstation there so that I don’t need to carry the laptop and tablet with me all the time. I planned to buy a Wacom but as a backup tablet, it is costly. It costs around ₹28,000 ($345) for a medium-sized Intuos Wacom. So I was searching for an alternative brand. I knew about Huion and XP-pen but the biggest requirement for me is that they should work on Linux without making me climb Everest.

I was happy to see a user of Huion reported that one model (H950p) works nicely with Linux on krita-artists.org. I went to the Huion website and found that there is a slightly newer model of this tablet with a USB-C option. It is the H610X model, this model has all the niceties of H950p plus it also works with android phones and tablets, a good travel companion. What’s more incredible is that this tablet costs 1/7th of the price of a Wacom, This tablet costs around ₹4000 ($50) here.

How to use Smart Objects in Krita?

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 16:54:18 +0000

Greetings Everyone 🙏🏼

This is the first quick tip tutorial post of this year. Today we are going learn about File Layers in Krita, for those who are coming from Photoshop “Smart Objects” may be a familiar term.

Let us learn about file layers in krita

In my recent advertising illustration project, I had to paint lots of small elements on a page. The page size was huge and the final layout was not fixed yet. The illustration was also going to be adapted to web and print media, that meant that the elements would be resized and moved around a lot across many files. Painting in groups and layers adding transform masks and transparency masks helps but once I changed an element in the main layout I would need to copy this group and layer to all others. Not a good thing when you are on the clock. And advertising tends to involve lots and lots of iterations.

So here comes the “File Layers” feature in Krita to my rescue. It basically helps us to add a file as a linked reference into a document, and when the external file changes it also updates the instances of this file inside all of our .kra file when we open them. We can also convert any group or layer into a file layer on the fly while working. This makes it really easy for us to break down the illustration elements of a project into multiple separate containers linked to a main file. We can then open these containers or file layers in Krita and work on them separately. This also becomes a boon if your file dimension is really huge. The file dimension of this project was 12k x 5k pixels. So this made total sense.

How to draw a sunset painting - Easy step by step Krita tutorial

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 06:11:39 +0000

Krita sunset tutorial - completed image

Greetings everyone. This is the second post in the step-by-step tutorial series and today you and I are going to draw a sea-side sunset painting in Krita. If you need a quick tour of the interface of Krita then you can watch my earlier videos about it.

Step 1

We start with a new document in Krita. Open Krita and click on the New File button, the shortcut is Ctrl + N. In the new file dialog let us keep the canvas in landscape mode. From the predefined preset drop-down choose “Film 16:9 4k” document preset. The dimensions will be 3840px X 2160 px. Click on the Create button.

New file dialog in Krita

First let us save the document, press Ctrl + S and add a nice name for the document and save it somewhere on your computer.

Step 2

I have prepared a colour palette for us, you can use this as a guide but feel free to choose your colours as you like. This is just for guiding us we may also tweak the colours as we paint. To use my palette we can use the reference image tool of Krita. Simply copy the palette image below and go to the Edit menu and click on Paste as Reference image [Ctrl + Shift +R] .

How to create a seamless pattern in Krita?

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 20:29:34 +0000

Gone are the days when you had to manually arrange the edges of a texture or pattern. No more copy-pasting, aligning, and offsetting the tiles. There is an easy and user-friendly mode in Krita that makes the tedious task of creating a seamless texture or pattern a piece of cake.

Game developers and textile artists will find this feature immensely helpful and time-saving. I was blown away by this feature when I first tried Krita. It has existed in Krita for ages and only recently did Photoshop get an inferior version of this feature.

I am assuming you have already downloaded and installed Krita from the official website. So without further ado let us see how it is done.

Step 1 - Create a Document

We will create a new document in Krita. Most seamless patterns are squares but in Krita, you can create rectangular tile too. Open Krita and you will be greeted by a welcome screen. Click on the New File link in the Start section. Or you can also press the shortcut CTRL + N . A new file dialog will open.

Krita’s new file dialog

In the Image Size section marked are number 1 in the image above fill in the dimension of the seamless tile we want. Here I fill in 512px by 512px. We can also choose a ready-made texture template from the template section marked as number 2 in the image. After choosing and filling in the detail click on Create button.

How to Draw a lemon slice - Krita digital painting tutorial - Easy step by step for beginners

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 12:48:00 +0530

In this video we learn how to create a lemon slice in Krita from scratch. I try to explain it in easy step by step manner so that you can draw along with me while watching the video. The goal here is not to make the coolest lemon illustration but to learn krita while creating something along with me. So feel free to draw by pausing the video

Episode Credits

Video recorded by raghukamath - Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License
Background Music - “Groove Grove” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
Made with Krita, Kdenlive & Audacity

Digital Art With Free Software Episode-06

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 12:48:00 +0530

This series is about creating digital art in free software. For those who don’t know what free software is please read this. This is the 6th episode in the series of tutorials for beginners in digital painting as well as Krita.

Episode Notes

In this lesson we explore various masks in Krita and also learn more about Selection Masks and how to use them in digital painting.

Episode Credits

Video recorded by raghukamath - Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License
Music - Haratanaya Sree by Veena Kinhal - via Wikimedia Commons - CC-0 license
Sitar by Kaiho - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license - Freesound.org
Swooshes by Dodgy C - CC-0 license - Freesound.org
Made with Krita, Kdenlive & Audacity

How to translate Krita to your own language?

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 12:00:44 +0530

While painting in Krita one day, out of curiosity I switched the application language to Hindi which is one of the major local language in India. Some parts of the UI were translated but most of it was untranslated. I thought about fixing this problem and started to research about how to get started in translating.

While there are many workflows for translating I found Lokalize to be the easiest one of them. I started using Lokalize & svn to work on Hindi translations for KDE. The Lokalize handbook is a good resource, but I felt that I needed more simplified step-by-step guide to set up the work environment and get started. After setting it up for my self, I am sharing it here so that any new Lokalize & svn user will find it easy. This post covers the process in step by step to help others translate Krita or any of the KDE apps in their local language and contribute to the KDE translation team. This guide is made for Linux users, but you can use it for other platforms too except for the step where we install the software. I plan to update these instructions in future to cover how to do this on Windows platform too. So here it goes.

How to auto colorize line art in Krita?

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 18:48:00 +0530

This is the second episode in the quick tip series. Let us check how to add clipping masks in Krita.

My Tools Of Trade

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 18:00:44 +0530

I have written earlier about how I made the switch to free software workflow and the experience I had after making the switch. It has been 6 years since then and I haven’t yet regretted my decision or found any trouble doing my work. Here is a list of software, hardware, and other tools that I use for day to day work, entertainment, and computing needs. I will try to keep this page updated as I include more tools or drop some of them in the future. Apart from this list, I will write another post explaining in more detail the software that I use.

On My Desk 👨🏽‍💻

Wacom Intuos Pro Medium
Self Assembled computer with:
- Intel® Core™ i7-4790K
- 32 GiB of memory
- GeForce GTX 750 Ti
BenQ SW2700PT (primary)
Dell S2409W 24" (secondary)
Logitech Z625 speakers
TVS Gold Mechanical keyboard
Canon Lide 220 Scanner
Brother HL-1201
i1 Display Pro color calibration
Dell Inspiron 15

Software (Both Desktop & Laptop)

Debian and Arch Linux- A GNU/linux based operating system.
KDE Plasma 5 - Simple yet powerful desktop environment with feature rich apps such as Konsole Kate etc.
Krita - A very robust professional digital painting application.
Mypaint - A lightweight sketching and painting application
Gnu Image Manipulation Program - An excellent software for image retouching and adjustment.
Inkscape - An excellent vector illustration suite.
Blender - Swiss army knife for anything between 3d modelling to video editing.
Scribus - Desktop publishing
Borg + btrbk - For incremental daily and hourly backups on internal as well as external disks.
Nextcloud - File, contacts, todo list & calendar sync.
Syncthing - Syncing file between devices.
Kmail - KDE’s mail application.
Conversations mobile - for chat with friends and family.
Keepassxc - Password manager.
Kasts - Podcast listening application

Self-Hosted software 🌏

Prosody - Chat server.
Quassel - IRC client

How To Add Clipping Masks In Krita?

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 18:48:00 +0530

This is the first episode in the quick tip series. Let us check how to add clipping masks in Krita.

Seamless Handmade Textures

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 12:17:00 +0530

I am sharing these free seamless handmade or hand-painted textures.These were made while I was working on various projects. Not all are hand-painted some are scanned and prepared from the original item, for example, the cartridge texture is a scan of a paper, some might have made by using resources in the public domain. These are shared under CC-BY-SA license, so you are free to reuse modify or share these I’ll be updating and adding more to this page as and when I make a new texture.

001-cement-texture-hires

002-brick-seamless-hires

003-leaves-seamless-hires

004-cartridge-texture-hires

005-mdf-seamless-hires

006-wall-plaster-hires

007-mosaic-tiles-hires

If you find these useful share them with your fellow artists and spread the word, I will also be excited to see how other artists have used these in their artwork. These are free to download but if you like to support me by donating money, you can use my PayPal link.

Is working with CMYK worth it?

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 21:00:44 +0530

Over the years it has been an unspoken rule to choose CMYK right at the start when creating new documents for artworks that are going to be printed. Many old-timers may remember working in CMYK from start to finish, carefully choosing colors and keeping an eye on the out of gamut warnings while color picking. Despite such efforts it would often lead to unsatisfactory results.

In the Free Software side of the world, many users demand CMYK support in applications and tell the developers that CMYK support it is the single most reason they don’t want to switch from the proprietary counterparts. So the question here is - Is working in CMYK from start to finish worth it? Are Free Software tools capable of CMYK workflow?

I would say no for choosing CMYK as the default colour-space for working and also that Free software tools nowadays are more than capable to handle CMYK in your workflow.

The reason I do not suggest in working in CMYK from the start is you lose many things just by trying to chase an unpredictable result. The first and foremost is that you lose a great number of color choices. You lose the ability to add filters, you get only a few blend modes to choose from, and above all, you limit your artwork to be in a color profile which is slowly losing its foothold. Nowadays Many people consume media on screen rather than on paper. So it is very silly to target only one section of the audience. If you work in RGB you are not restricted with the number of colors, filters or blend modes, etc. You can also convert your artwork later for print consumption.

KritaCon 2019

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 15:00:00 +0530

The Krita team - Photo courtesy David Revoy/Krita Foundation - CC-BY

Once again this year, I participated in Krita sprint held at an awesome historical town of Deventer. Thanks to KDEeV and Krita Foundation for sponsoring my stay and travel. I got to meet some old friends again and had a chance to be acquainted with new members of the Krita community. I also feel happy to say that this is so far the biggest Krita sprint in terms of the number of attendees. It shows that our community is growing big rapidly.

5 August

I reached Deventer a bit late in the afternoon on Monday 5th August. I was greeted by some new faces like Emmett, Eoin, Tusooa (who gave an awesome key-chain to everyone) Mariya, Alberto, Noemi and some familiar ones like Wolthera, Stefan, Scott, Tyyppi, Dmitry, and of course the wonderful hosts Boud and Irina.

We had some chat and I took some rest for the day.

6 August

On Tuesday we welcomed some more members. I met with Hellozee, Rebecca, Agata, Ivan and Sara for the first time. I also felt sad that I didn’t get a chance to meet Sharaf Zaman, who has done a wonderful job of porting Krita to Android. Since many people were still on their way and we had postponed the meeting to Thursday, We discussed some issues and kick-started the sprint. I got a chance to test the HDR rig that Boud had set up to test in the cellar. I had some mixed feelings about this, although the monitor had a great range of colors, the brightness was too much for me to handle. I look forward to the day when these monitors become common in the industry and maybe the day when Linux supports HDR monitors :D.

Digital art with foss episode 5

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 20:48:00 +0530

This series is about creating digital art in free software. For those who don’t know what free software is please read this. This is the fifth episode in the series on basics of painting in krita.

Episode Notes

In this episode we learn about Layers, their types and way to manage them in Krita. We also see a basic and simple setup of layers required to create a drawing in Krita.

Episode Credits

Background Music - Mridangam Jati by - Ajaysm
Licensed under CC-0.

Designing Posters With Free Software

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 14:54:44 +0530

A few months back I was asked to design some poster for a local Free Software Foundation Event. Richard M Stallman was visiting our country, and my friend Abhas Abhinav wanted to put up some posters and banners. Due to me being down with flu I couldn’t do the number of banners and posters that I initially intended to do. However, I managed to create two posters for RMS’ talk in Bangalore. This is a short note down of the process that I typically use to create my artwork with F/LOSS (Free / Libre Open Source Software) tools. Although many artists successfully use Free Software to create artworks, I repeatedly encounter many comments in discussion forums claiming that free software is not made for creative work. This post is also my effort in spreading awareness that one can do professional work with the help of F/LOSS tools. I chose this project to document my process because it is not encumbered with NDA as my other ongoing projects and I felt that this topic is closer to Free Software.

Sketches

After understanding the initial requirement from Abhas, I sat down to visualize some concepts. I am not that great of a copywriting person, so in order to get some copy material, I started reading the FSF website. Given that I was already late to create anything, I wanted something that would be done in 2 days time, while simultaneously working with other projects. I started sketching some rough layouts. From a lot of 5 layouts, I liked three. I scanned them using Skanlite, these sketches were very rough at that moment and would need proper lay outing and design, but they were a good base for me to work.

Krita Sprint 2018

Wed, 23 May 2018 12:48:00 +0530

I had an awesome opportunity to be a part of this years Krita sprint in The Netherlands. Once in a while artists and developers who are working in Krita meet to discuss bugs, improvements and road map for Krita. The Sprint was organised by the Krita Foundation and KDE e.V.

I got to meet all the people that I know only by IRC nicknames. Halla and Irina were excellent hosts and made sure that everyone was feeling comfortable. I started working with Wolthera and Timothée, porting the remaining pages of the manual in the tutorial section to Sphinx. We are porting the manual from Media Wiki to Sphinx to make sure you can download the manual in pdf form for offline use.

I met Valarii Malov who is doing an awesome job maintaining the graphics tablet KCM in KDE. . We had some talks and testing of the KCM and believe me the KCM is awesome in its current state, it exposes various setting which was only possible via xsetwacom. This work will help many artists who will use KDE as their distro for daily work.

A big thanks to Timothée for solving my color calibration problem, now my laptop is not blueish and has proper color. I tried to do some portraits and sketches during the sprint. I couldn’t complete all of them but below is a rough portrait of our hosts Halla and Irina.

Digital art with foss episode 4

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 22:48:00 +0530

In this video, I am going to talk about digital brushes. In real life brushes, pens, knives are the tools used to apply and manipulate colours on canvas, similarly in digital painting we have a brush tool that helps to add and manipulate pixels. First, we will see what digital brushes are made of, which will help us in tweaking and creating our own brushes in future

Digital brushes in Krita

Episode Credits

Sitar music in the background by Kaiho Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Digital art with foss episode 3

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 21:48:00 +0530

In this episode we will learn how to navigate around the canvas in Krita. This video will have lots of shortcut so for your convenience I have prepared a PDF with list of these shortcuts as a PDF with all the shortcuts mentioned in this video, you can download it from the link here.

Episode Credits

Sitar music in the background by Kaiho Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Digital art with foss episode 2

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 21:48:00 +0530

This series is about creating digital art in free software. For those who don’t know what free software is please read this.

Workspace and Dockers

Episode Notes

Krita’s flexible workspace is really easy to customise according to our needs. In this video we see how to customise and create our own workspace. We also learn about dockers in Krita.

Episode Credits

Swaramandal by luckylittleraven Licensed under CC0.
Sitar music in the background by Kaiho Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Digital art with foss episode 1

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 15:48:00 +0530

This series is about creating digital art in free software. For those who don’t know what free software is please read this. This is the first episode in the series on basics of painting in krita.

Episode Notes

Krita is a free and open source digital painting application. We take a tour of Krita’s interface and learn how to create a new document in Krita.

Swatantra 2017

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 12:48:00 +0530

ICFOSS is an organisation set up by Govt. of Kerala, with a goal to spread free software knowledge by connecting and collaborating with international free software communities and organisations. I was invited to be a part of their triennial conference called Swatantra 2017. There were close to 22 speakers from all over the world and this time there was a section on art in open source. This is the first time that a free software conference in India had a section focused on art.

The venue was a nice heritage hotel in Trivandrum, Kerala. Trivandrum is a fantastic city, it is calmer and laid back when compared to Mumbai, it has some Art-deco styled buildings which are often fused with traditional Kerala style architecture. Spent a wonderful time there with David Revoy , Timothée Giet, Praveen, Sumantro, Yogesh, Aruna, other free software enthusiasts from fsci. It was wonderful to meet Arun, Abhas and also Nishant who records music on Linux!

At the conference we were greeted by goodies, they gave us an awesome bag, USB and other items. The conference started with a keynote speech from Karen Sandler, followed by amazing sessions by David Revoy who explained the making of Pepper & Carrot , Sumantro explained how to contribute to Fedora, Aruna spoke about how FOSS empowered her. Timothée showed us how to animate in Synfig and the journey of Gcompris until now. There were many speakers and parallel sessions and I was confused in choosing which ones to attend:).

Twilight orchestra in Inkscape

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 12:48:00 +0530

I mostly use Krita for my professional and personal illustration work. Every now and then when I require vector illustrations I turn towards Inkscape.

I have done some professional illustration in Inkscape but they were not so detailed in nature. I am trying to bring more and more vector art into my portfolio. This piece is just to practice and polish my Inkscape skills. I already know the concepts of vector illustration and have used a vector illustration software such as Adobe illustrator and Corel draw. So learning Inkscape is just a matter of learning the new ways or rather Inkscape’s way of doing the things which I used to do with illustrator or Corel draw.

I am drawing an owl which is directing an orchestra in the twilight of a moon. I tried to keep the colors to minimum may be around shades of blue and yellow and slight oranges here and there.

At first I scan my initial very rough and ugly sketch of an Owl on a A5 notepad paper. For scanning my artworks I use a software called Xsane. It is very feature complete and simple to use and does what I want without the need of tinkering too much.

Brush pack for Krita V2.0

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:30:00 +0530

In my previous post, I had shared some of the brushes that I use while painting in Krita. This is the second release of that brush pack. In this release I have added some more presets to the pack and also tweaked some of the brushes to utilise newly added parameter in Krita such asratio. I have also reduced the brush tip images used in the pack and utilised the default auto tips. An example configuration can be seen in the image below.

Brush tip setting in Krita

I also refreshed the brush icons a bit in this release.

Brush previews

You can download the brush pack from here.

To install, just unzip the contents of the zip file, then in Krita go to settings > Manage resources, then click on open resource folder button. A folder will be opened in the file explorer then copy the contents inside the unzipped folder namely folders named - brushes and paintoppresets, then paste and merge the contents to the folders inside the resources folder. Then restart Krita, the brushes are ready to use, just search for pack01 in the brush filter. Go here for more clear instructions.

This time I have also created a bundle file for this pack, you can download the bundle file from here.

Switch To Freedom

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 19:41:00 +0530

"A foolish person only learns about fire when he burns himself".

This is a phrase in my mother tongue, After being burnt by closed source software I finally made the switch to Free and Open source Software. This is but this particular experience is new to me and I felt like I should share it.

In 2009, after much research and reading countless reviews, I bought a Dell laptop for my sister. I had purchased a laptop without an OS on it. Well it came with basic Free-DOS installed on it.

I got the delivery at night, and like any other gadget that I bought I was excited and started to set it up without wasting any time. I had downloaded a Linux distribution called “Ubuntu” beforehand.

Unless you muster up your will and plunge into the water. You won’t learn how to swim. Without any deep knowledge of Linux, I installed it slowly by reading guides and help forums. My internet connection was not good since my neighbourhood had not yet dreamt of Fibre or broadband, I downloaded and finished installing the OS till 6 AM with good PPP and dial-up connection from local ISP.

I was greeted by the purplish and orange wallpaper, I poked around a bit and I liked it. It was working great, I wondered how can someone give a whole Operating System for free and that too with all the tools that are needed for daily task without even charging a penny. My sister liked it too. She still uses that laptop with Ubuntu 14.10 on it.