Process on Raghukamath – Digital Painter and Freelance Illustrator from India

Morning Ride

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 13:10:48 +0000

Today was a beautiful sunny day. I saw this on my way to get groceries. It was such a relaxing ride.

The license is CC-BY-SA , feel free to use it as a wallpaper or anything. Here is the high resolution file

Fishermen on the beach

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 12:41:18 +0000

I went to nearby beach last week, it was really a pristine and calm place. The beach is Padubidri Blue Flag beach. It is in the Pudubidri town in coastal Karnataka India. The beach was less crowded and the fishermen were enjoying their work. Some a group of small fishermen were getting ready to depart for fishing and were having some fun moment during inspecting their boat.

I tried to capture this moment along with the scene.

Digital painting of fishermen on padubidri beach India

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I am trying more to put down minimal strokes but make sure it is in right place with right colour so that when you zoom in you can see the raw strokes.

Here is the process video that I recorded while painting this in Krita with the recorder feature of Krita.

The cat, the hen and a boy - Sunday Sketch Trip

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 16:30:53 +0000

A Sunday well spent on an wonderful sketch trip with @coolkarnisam and friends. The village Ambeshiv is located on the banks of the Ulhas river near Badlapur. The village was laid back and devoid of all the urgency of the city. Good way to slow down and focus on some skills.

These were done with brush with black gouache paint and Kuretake Sumi ink .

boy

cat

hen

house-door-01

house-door-02

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.

A trek to Kondana caves

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 17:55:17 +0000

After postponing it for 2-3 weeks due to work load, this Sunday me and my friend Sameer, finally managed to take some time out in our schedule and go on a trek to Kondana Caves. I have decided to do such type of treks at least once a month to refresh my mind. The visual library in the mind gets updated and it becomes really a good educational exercise too. I get to absorb new things, texture, colours and concepts. This helps me to keep my style fresh and also helps me break out of monotonous work environment where I stare at computer screen most of the time during work. I also get to collect rich reference photos and ideas for later use. It is really like recharging your battery.

The Trip

We started at 8.30 A.M in the morning and after riding for about 54 Km we reached there at 11.00 A.M. Since this is not monsoon season, there were not many tourists. We parked our scooter at the base in an open area and started to climb up. Since I am now not used to walking large distance or climbing hills, this trek exhausted me in the beginning. It was not that hard but I noticed my stamina has decreased too much. I need more treks like this to get accustomed to this type of excursion.

Night - Time-lapse Painting in Krita

Sun, 31 Oct 2021 15:48:00 +0530

I tried to paint a personification of the night. Beautiful calm and romantic yet sometimes eerie and daunting. I think the beautiful side won in this painting. Here is the process. May be next time I’ll move more towards the fear aspect. You can buy the print for this painting on my INPRNT page.

Here is the final image

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Background Music - music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

One With Nature - Time-lapse Painting in Krita

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 15:48:00 +0530

It is Friday again and I went on a small hike with my friend yesterday, as we were walking amidst the forest on a small trail, the calmness of the surrounding nature seemed almost meditative to me. It instantly drained all my stress built up during the week. This painting is inspired by one of the spots we encountered while walking in the forest.

Here is the final image

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Background Music - Meditative Space by MaxKoMusic | https://maxkomusic.com/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nature sound effects from chosic.com | License - Public domain

Virtual plienair from streetview - somewhere in Tokushima Japan

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 18:48:00 +0530

It’s friday and what is a better way to wind up the weekend than painting a landscape in Krita. Did a quick 2½ hr session. Fullscreen mode in krita with all desktop notifications off, mobile switched to do not disturb mode and some soothing music along with it, just pure bliss. Do you paint like this for relaxing yourself?

Here is the final image

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Background Music - Music - Summer Memories by - extenz (https://soundcloud.com/extenz) License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Waiting For Unlock...

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0530

Some school buses parked since start of the pandemic near my house. Its been a while since children saw school. Instead of a landscape I thought why not paint some vehicles, so I did this outdoor study.

Here is the final image

Few details

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Summer Fun - Timelapse

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0530

I am sure we all have done this at some point.

Here is the final image

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Virtual Plein-Air Wandering At Daybreak

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 18:48:00 +0530

Stumbled upon a wonderful street view on mapcrunch, so did a virtual plein-air study with it.

Here is the final image

completed painting

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Background Music - Chasing Daylight by Scott Buckley - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Master Chef Timelapse

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 18:48:00 +0530

Here is the final image

Credits

Artwork by raghukamath licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Intro Music - Stream Countdown 10s & Background Music - Forest Wak by by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com). Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
Intro Background Video by Miguel Á. Padriñán. Licensed under Pexels License

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

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.

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.

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.

Digital Landscape paintings

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 11:30:00 +0530

I have been following the awesome James Gurney for quiet some time now. His book Color and Light- A Guide for the Realist Painter is an excellent resource for painters. Inspired by both his book and his youtube videos, I wanted to spend some time studying landscape painting and improving my understanding of colors and values present in nature.

Here is the first set of such paintings

I also recorded the process of some painting

I also tried a vector only landscape painting. This piece was done using inkscape only. The gradient and filters in inkscape helped me achive the desired look. I want to do some more of vector only paintings in future. You can download the source file for this painting from here.

Festival of lights - timelapse painting

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 16:07:00 +0530

I am grateful to krita foundation for giving me an opportunity of getting published among the fine artists from all over the world. My illustration is chosen for the first art book by Krita foundation called Made with Krita. This art book will be given as rewards for the backer of the kick-starter campaign

I recorded the process of the painting, below is the time lapse video of the process.

Completed Illustration for made in Krita book

The hunt - timelapse painting

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 23:19:00 +0530

I recorded my screen during the last painting session. It took me 5hrs to do this piece the video is sped up so that it can fit in 5 minutes. I plan to record more such painting it helps me to find weak points in my work flow :)

Finished Illustration – The hunt

Details

Experiments with linocut

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:21:00 +0530

Last year in early March me and my friend Sameer decided to try out Linocut. I thought documenting the process will be good.

I am fairly late in documenting this. We collaborated in producing some canvas murals for a client , the canvases were done in acrylic paints. We mostly work in digital medium so after having a taste of traditional medium we thought trying out some printing technique would be great fun. It turned out a really awesome experience.

The tool to carve on the linocut

Preparing the ink

We first thought of trying out woodblock prints, but we later settled on linoleum blocks. We got some linoleum blocks and the cutters and inks. Finding the right ink was an adventure in itself. We got acquainted the ink supplier, he was a good person. He shared his concerns about how digital medium has reduced the people doing traditional printing. He was glad that we are trying it.

The process itself was very fun, chipping out the negative space in the linoleum was very different from the monotonous work we do otherwise. The main challenge was that there was no “undo” or Ctrl + Z not even a eraser would help, so planning was crucial, once you carve a design in the linoleum sheet you can’t revert it :)

Mermaid illustration process

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 12:19:00 +0530

An illustration done in free time using Krita. This piece was done in between work, I have recorded most of the process, you can watch the time-lapse video below. The fish scales were fun to paint , it was easy to paint them in wrap around mode of Krita a real time saver

Credit

Music : Jellyfish In Space - Kevin MacLeod

The completed illustration

Finidhed Illustration of Mermaid

Facial details

Two hour speed painting

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 23:27:00 +0530

2hr speed-painting in krita. I tried to finish this painting in 2 hr, I might have taken 5-10 minutes extra :)

Credits

Music - Living Voyage by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Attribution 3.0 International License.

The finished painting

Process - character illustration

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 23:18:00 +0530

Recorded my process for the first time. It was a great experience to analyse my process while viewing as a third person. Can’t say this is a tutorial, but I tried to explain certain things on the go. I’ll improve next time.

Part 1

Part 2

Final Illustration of the character – A maharaja

P.S. I am in love with this application - Krita. Let me know what you think.