LGM 2012 : Krita Workshop report

Posted on May 11th, 2012

More details about the Krita workshop I made at Libre Graphics Meeting last week:

The goal of this workshop was to teach my workflow to use Krita for comics-style drawing.
After some explanations about my hardware and shortcuts setup (as some of you may know I use a joypad for all my shortcuts, using Qjoypad to map the keys, as my tablet-setup desn’t allow me for a keyboard access easily), I started opening a sketch of a “Libre Graphics Captain” super-hero that I prepared for the occasion:

Libre Graphics Captain - base

Then I explained how I ink and color it quickly. For the ink, most important points are to choose the right presets, and to be confortable drawing energic strokes , using a lot the canvas pan and rotation shortcuts to adapt the canvas position to your movement. Then for color, a first step to fill the areas with base colors, then a few layers over it using blending modes to apply shadows and highlights, using the “layer groups + alpha disable” mask trick, and a final layer using color-smudge brush to paint details/corrections. I did the demo on the face only, to fit the workshop timing; also I added a few modifications following the audience suggestions ;) :

Libre Graphics Captain - lgm2012

Then I finished it at home, here is the final result (you can notice I’ve re-painted all the light as I made them in the wrong direction at the workshop :P …) :
Libre Graphics Captain - Finished

Again I want to say that I’m very happy of how the place was filled with great people and everyone was very interested, asking good questions.
Thanks for coming!

Posted in Comics, FLOSS, Illustrations | Tagged as: , , ,

New brush engine mode in Krita: blend like in Mypaint

Posted on May 9th, 2012

A few days ago, while I was away on LGM, Silvio Heinrich (a cool coder -and- painter from the Krita team) added the new Dulling mode to his “Color smudge” engine.
So it’s now possible, in the “Smudge Rate” properties panel of this brush engine, to choose between “Smearing” or “Dulling” Smudge modes.
“Smearing” is the old behavior (morel like a classic smudge)
“Dulling” is the new mode, doing color mix similar to mypaint or other famous painting softwares.

This is a very good news, so I’ve already added 3 presets in the default pack using this wonderful feature.

Here is a screenshot showing a quick flower painted mostly with this engine (except the light effect at the center);
Also you can see the added presets, which are the “purple strokes” ones.

More paint in Krita

I Love this Brush

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Using Oyranos on Kubuntu 12.04

Posted on May 8th, 2012

Here is a little tutorial to help you install the powerful Oyranos Color-Management-System on Kubuntu 12.04
(at least on a KDE/Plasma desktop, as the Kolor-manager simple interface is on the KDE systemsettings panel, I’m not sure how to use it on other desktops).

So first thing to do is to add the getdeb repository to your system, as the latest Oyranos core is available from there.
- download the GetDeb repository installer , then double-click on it and install.
-in a terminal, run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential git oyranos liboyranos-dev oyranos-icc oyranos-doc kdelibs5-dev xcalib libyajl-dev

Now that oyranos core is installed, you’ll want to use kolor-manager, which is a simple interface to setup oyranos easily.
Unfortunately, it’s not packaged yet on get-deb, so you’ll have to build it.

You’ll have to download the sources on a folder called, for example, sources/ ,
then create a build folder in it to make the build,
then install in another separate folder, called for example kdetest.
All this in your home, so it’s not mixed with system packages.

So to do all this, in the terminal:

mkdir sources
cd sources
git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kolor-manager.git
cd kolor-manager
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=home/USERNAME/kdetest
make
make install

Then in .profile (hidden file in your home folder, if it doesn’t exist already create one), add this line:
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIRS:/home/USERNAME/kdetest
In case if you need several of these paths (like here I’ve another one for calligra/krita), separate them with : like this:
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIRS:/home/USERNAME/kde4/inst:/home/USERNAME/kdetest
(of course replace USERNAME with your session name)

Now Restart your session, and you’ll can find the color management in the systemsettings panel :)

Then in the parameters, you can define default profiles for all kinds of colorspaces.
I leave you the fun to discover all the features inside… Enjoy!

(Note: Like always when you build software, it depends on libraries installed on your system. I’ve tried to list all those needed in the apt-get install line, but I may have missed some as I already built several other softwares here… So if you have an issue at some point, feel free to send me an email using the contact form, with the output of the terminal pasted in it, so I can identify any missing libraries or other issues and fix this tutorial.)

(Note2: If you only want the Oyranos packages and no other update from get-deb, you can disable the repository after installing it so it doesn’t bring unwanted updates next time you’ll update your system. This is easy to do using Muon or Synaptic package managers for example…)

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LGM 2012: a crazy week in Vienna!

Posted on May 7th, 2012

Back from the Libre Graphics Meeting, it’s been a crazy week with tons of cool people.
The event was happening in parallel with the Linuxwochen one in the FH Technikum, so the place was really filled with cool geeks, lots of good vibes in the place… :.)

Very interesting talks and workshops:
°Regarding color management I now want to get a ColorHug device, and I’m very happy and gratful to Kai-Uwe for helping me on getting his powerful Oyranos CMS software working right on Kubuntu 12.04. Complete tutorial to come next blog post ;)

°Ricardo and Ana made a great presentation on fonts improvements for the web using some magic scripts, I’ll have to give a try and experiment with this.
And I’ve been happy they brought some Libre Graphics Magazine 1.3 and latest 1.4, so I could complete my collection :D

°Ramon Miranda made a nice show with his impressing painting work, showing the power inside the tools we have in free software, and giving his vision for the future of floss painting tools.. So cool I finally met him in real life, and we spent a lot of time talking about digital paiting tools and other things… Lot of fun!

°Martin Renold made an interesting talk about “predictable painting” related to his work on the mypaint brush, as if you don’t know he’s the original creator of mypaint… Now I see where the original coolness of mypaint comes from… With Jon Nordby (another important mypaint coder) also being there this year again, that was more representation of the mypaint team than last year and I’m sure it’ll help them to get things impoving fast in their cool painting software… Very cool people :D

°Tom Lechner made a talk about his software Laidout, an experimental publishing tool that is very interesting, I should dig in when I’ve some time… As his soft, his artistic work is crazy, very good work. Much respect! So I’ve been glad to meet him this year again.

°The Scribus Team had an official workshop and some ponctual group-talk about how to improve scribus… Things are likely to evolve quicker than before, I’ve good hopes from what I’ve heard. Definitely the free software tool for traditional publishing work ;)

°Mairin Duffy and Emily Dirsh made some clever work on collaboration tools for free minded designers ;.)
Very interesting talk, I’m sure I’ll use these tools at some point…
A few interesting links to explore the subject HERE, HERE and HERE.

°Johan Engelen presented his work on Powerstroke, that is an awesome line width system for the vector graphics editor Inkscape. This kind of system already existed since a long time in synfig studio in a more simple way (but since a recent update came almost like this powerstroke feature with the “advanced outlines”), so I see how this will improve greatly the possibilities to use inkscape and synfig together when the conversion will be possible in the .sifz export from inkscape… Awesome things to come!

°CONGRATS TO THE GIMP TEAM for the 2.8 release, that happened right during LGM! The Goats are invading the place, and things are getting awesome with EXR support, opencl acceleration, gimp is here to stay the best floss image manipulation software … Also GEGL power is jumping beyond the barriers of Gimp and is already invading mypaint, and even some could go in exotic lands of Synfig, and who knows, maybe some could reach to pass the wall of Krita ;) (as pippin told me, to make it short, that it can now be used as a kind of bindings without replacing another current system)

°Femke Snelting and Marcos Garcia talked about their activities for the Libre Graphics Reasearch Units that is a collaboration between four european Media-labs associations involved in free graphics artistic creation culture. It’s good to see such serious work on creating structures to develop such things. And of course this can be a big help to other libre graphics projects.

°A surprising “Remote talk” of Bassam Kurdali, director of the “Tube” Open Movie using Blender 3D for animation in a distributed pipeline. Crazy demo shots of rendering, making-of… at least one representation of Blender at LGM for this year, even if remote, is better than nothing. video available here.

And many other good talks, sorry for those I missed… This year’s program was so huge it was anyway impossible for 1 person to see everything :.D

Then the last day morning was busy for me:
-It started with the collaborative talk I did with Lukas Tvrdy, where he presented what happened since last year in Krita while I illustrated his words showing the features on the software.
-I made a talk/demo about synfig studio to introduce the basic history, concept and features. I prepared a (too big) demo that I had to fast-forward a bit, so I’ll convert it in an online tutorial soon.
-Two more talks related to synfig studio: first Konstantin Dmitriev (aka Zelgadis) presented the Morevna project and more precisely the Remake tool, that is a valuable little software that make workflow on a big-scaled project using Synfig and/or blender (and/or any software having a CLI available for rendering) much easier.
Third synfig studio talk was by Diego (aka eldruin), a coder from synfig team, presenting the possibilities to enhance synfig studio in the current state, sending a message to all potentially interested coders to join the fun!
-Then I made the Krita workshop about drawing comics-style illustration. For me it’s been a success as the room was filled, and mostly with great people whose I love the work, so it was an honor for me to have so much attention. We discovered some issues in Krita 2.4 packaging on Fedora that’s missing some features… But globally everyone learned a lot and was happy… It last almost 2 hours… mission complete!

Also many other surprises, like discovering the Vienna metalab, an impressive hackerspace where the community is really great and friendly. Knowledge-sharing power! Thanks to Pepi for the tour and for introducing me to Kallaballa, who showed me his work on a hack to make Gimp play sound/noise/music, called SoundFumble (thank you for uploading it so fast! ;) ). It was so impressive that he managed to have a quick demo/live show with it at the LGM before the end. Everyone there was amazed :D

Too bad the Tupi talk was cancelled, I didn’t have news about this but I’m a little sad the Tupi maintainer couldn’t make it happen…

Now I’m waiting for the cool photos taken there to spread all over the web. Too bad almost all the talks have not been recorded, but I’m lucky there was a video camera running the saturday morning, so my talks should be online some day soon.

Again many thanks to everyone who came to participate in any way and made this wonderful event happen…

See you next year… (in Madrid so !?!)

Posted in FLOSS | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Krita 2.4 official release

Posted on April 12th, 2012

Yeah! Finally the Krita team is proud to release the 2.4 version, along with the Calligra suite.
Check the annoucement on the website.
This release is dedicated in memory of Jean Giraud aka Moebius, whose work has always been a great source of inspiration, and will stay in my memory.

To celebrate this release, I’ve uploaded the tutorial videos from “Comics with Krita” DVD on my youtube channel:

Also the complete DVD is now available on bittorent, thanks to Freetorrent.fr.
You can still order the dvd+comic-book pack to support the Krita, enjoy the printed copy of the comics and have an original copy of the dvd for your collection ;.)

Enjoy!

Posted in Comics, FLOSS, Illustrations, Misc. | Tagged as: , ,