Tutorials 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.