David Revoy

Mypaint brushes for "l'heritage en couleur"

David REVOY — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:56:00 +0200

I received request on my comments and email about the Mypaint brushes I did or tweaked for making my little graphic novel 'l'héritage en couleur' . Here is a speed packed version with better icons.

Usage :

The workflow is explained on the making of here , artwork can be seen here : L'heritage en couleur .

On the picture :

1. The red pencil I use for my perspective

2. The same pencil in blue I use for sketching

3. The same pencil in black I use for 'inking' with a grain

( note : this 3 tools auto change color on selection for productivity )

4. The big watercolor brush I used for watercolor fringe effect

5. A small watercolor-like brush to detail.

Other brushes I used are already shipped with Mypaint in the set #2

Download

The link to download ( zip file, 99KB ): 2012-05-15_heritage-en-couleur_brushes.zip

To install :

Simply download the zip file , and open it in Mypaint with the menu Brush > Import brush package. You'll have a new group of brush named : hc_brush. You can then remove the zip file. I hope the brush will be compatible with Mypaint 1.0 user ; as I made them in a more recent development version on Linux.

Licence of this brushes :

Public domain , do whatever you want with, just don't forget to have fun.

Ancient Beast : volcano creature

David REVOY — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:56:00 +0200

Here is my contribution for the open project http://www.ancientbeast.com/ : " a 2D turn based strategy game played online against other people, featuring a wide variery of items and creatures to aquire and put to good use in order to defeat your opponents. Ancient Beast is free, open source and developed by Freezing Moon (and community) ". ( information from website ). Done with Krita.

If you want to create a new art for the project or contribute, contact the project leader "Dread Knight" via the chat proposed on the website ( chat section ), he already have tons of ideas and concept ready. You can also check the gallery .

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Attribution : Ancient Beast ( www.ancientbeast.com ) , from an original concept of Katarzyna Zalecka , aka Kasia88 ( http://kasia88.deviantart.com ) , artwork : David Revoy ( www.davidrevoy.com )

making of : l'héritage en couleur

David REVOY — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:02:00 +0200

Here is a post were I present the workflow I used , research and concept-art done for my graphic novel posted in a previous blog post 'l'heritage en couleur' .

1. Storyboarding

After the story was written and concept done , I drew the storyboard ; a very rough version to see if the story works visually.

I used Krita mainly to paint the storyboard. I painted it keeping the width of 750px and used openraster *.ora to work with Krita and Mypaint. I kept low details.

2. Sketch and perspective

For this second steps , I resized my pages to 1500px large to be more confortable with zooming and drawing details. My storyboard get converted to a bright blue transparent to use it as a guideline, and I drew over on 2 layers with Mypaint :

- " sketch " where I detailed most of the character and object

- " persp " where I drew perspective guidelines with red.

I made 2 new presets taking advantages of the 'save color' ability of Mypaint (on the picture : the two first preset in my list ; red, and blue sketch tool ) to switch tool faster during the production.

Perspectives works were easy to do thanks to the new feature 'straight lines' developed by Optigon for future Mypaint . Also, infinite canvas were perfect for vanishing point outside of the frame. Of course drawing outside involved to do a cropping manually later on all page.

3. cleaned lineart ( outlines )

The inking was done also in Mypaint, but this time using my Cintiq21UX tablet. It was the first time I used it specificaly for a production.I think it was a wrong choice :

- Cintiq is hot and makes unconfortable works after 4 hours on it

- having eyes so close to the screen on a long period made headaches

- distance between nib of the stylus and screen pixels is quite large for a precision work

- finaly the precision and resolution is not very good ; I felt like I had to fill pixels on a grid.

The good point compared to a traditional media inking is :

- the luck to work with a super eraser who don't hurt paper

- a undo.

- have layers , duplicate some parts etc...

- avoid complex scanning time with traditional

Optigon drawing tools were also precious for drawing building and perspective on the fly.

I could ink without stress to miss a line, but still it wasn't comfortable and still frustrating to deal with the Cintiq.

4. Grey digital watercolor

Now my page are cropped to the final size x 2, sketch layer cleaned and I also added a 'panel' layer , where are drawn the frame separators. Krita is perfect for doing all this task over the open raster files.

As my graphic novel was mostly in black&white , I colored all the novel in a first pass with grey. I used the watercolor preset of the set #2 in Mypaint for it. I also customized and added 2 new presets ; one to details while still keeping a sort of watercolor fringe , and another one, a bit bigger who simulates very strong watercolor wet diffusion effects.

Working with value is easier to focus on the depht of the picture and shading. This is something I liked to do and who was effective.

5. coloring, compositing, texturing

Coloring was done in Krita, using big airbrushes with color blending mode as HSY color, or Soft Light mode, or Multiply.

Thanks to the value already managed with the previous step, it was a easy and fast task to color all. The only difficult things were to keep consistent with the color palette from one frame to another. I could use the palette dockers, but this one have to be reloaded each time on Krita. So I used as a workaround a layer with a mini palette on it.

The last touch is a very light paper textures layer above my colors , in 'overlay' blending mode, to break the "digital flatness".

6. Export

Final pages were exported using a custom bash script using the software calligraconverter ( a CLI tool installed with Krita ) ( to convert page from *.ora to flat *.png ) then the temp *.png was processed within the same script with imagemagick for resize to 750px , compress to web , and sharpen a little bit. I made this custom script as a KDE services.

II ) The research and concept-art :

Here under a sample from a lot of research I did for this comics. I kept brainstorming about technic , style, rendering, and workflow. You'll see on them an attempt to draw all the comics on real pages, pencilling , inking and scans , 3D layout, speedpaintings , etc... All the joy of starting from scratch :)

I had fun to make this graphic novel ; but I spent a lot of time doing sketch, trying format, testing workflow, etc. If I could finish it, it was thanks to a pack of great updates on the tools I use, so thanks Krita and Mypaint teams. For the next graphic novel, I will also try to avoid the usage of the Cintiq ; if I need to do line-arts now I know I better have to do it on paper.

To see again the final graphic novel , follow this link : 'l'heritage en couleur' .

l'héritage en couleur

David REVOY — Sat, 05 May 2012 06:36:00 +0200

Thanks for reading

More infos :

This graphic novel is a personal project made aside from my daily work as an illustrator.

I tried to depict in it a difficult theme but a one witch is close to my heart : the way children are affected by a negative ambient at home, and social difficulties they can endure in consequences. I'm always shocked when I meet parents who send unconsciously their violence, pessimism or sadness to their children. This novel is not really a mental answer to it, just a heart reaction.

I learned a lot of things while writing and drawing this one. About myself and about my technics. It was done using only free and open sources software on Linux and I will publish soon the ' making-of ' material. By the way, I'm already working on the next one.

[ * update 2012-05-10 : making of published here ]

links around the theme :

( fr ) http://www.le-nouveau-role-parental.fr/ ( google translate link )

licence :

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

It means in general that you are free to re-post it on a website as long as it is not for commercial use, without made derivative or changing anything in it ( respect the file compression , the colors and the size ) and with keeping it attributed to me. A link back to this website will be also appreciated. For more infos, read the full version , and if you want to make another usage, contact me for a special authorization.

Kubuntu 12.04 install notes

David REVOY — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:09:00 +0200

Past days I did a spring cleaning on my computer ( spring cleaning on my web portfolio too ) .

I reviewed last Arch, Chakra, Suse , Debian to be informed about actual systems . My choice stopped again* on Kubuntu , for the 12.04 LTS . Faster, cleaner and polished, I get totally seduced by it. The default artworks ( login screen -picture above- ; and wallpaper are also fresh and clean ) . Good job Kubuntu team !

It's also the first distribution where you can install in few minutes a full functional workstation directly from the "Software center" . It has wacom tablet support plus Mypaint 1.0 , Krita 2.4, Blender 2.62, Inkscape 0.48.3 and Gimp 2.6.12 with not any single line of terminal to install.

screenshot above : Mypaint good ranking and easy install in the software center , same for Krita 2.4 ...etc...

To give you an idea, those versions are the one I used for working on the Mango concept-art in February. So they are very fresh for stable package and it's a very good news ; you can now install them in Kubuntu and have a professional workstation ready. Ideal also for new users.

Now, the last part of this article is about my notes for more advanced users. It's about testing version or compiled version.

For brave testers , contributors :

Now, if you want the unstable but more recent version and if you like to live dangerously , you'll have to open a terminal and start breaking things. Kubuntu 12.04 is also ideal to install the last bleeding-edge softwares. The following will install the applications and you will be able to access them from the menu. Open 'Konsole' from the menu , copy the line under one by one (Ctrl+C ) then paste in your terminal ( Ctrl+Shift+V ). Accept with 'y' or 'enter' on prompt. Don't copy lines starting by '#' they are comments to help you to know what you are doing.
Also , I advice you to read also the comments of this blog post, other users may wrote interesting warning or other useful infos.

Gimp 2.8 RC 1

First, you might want to use Gimp 2.8 , still in release candidate, I hate the new brush outliner , but the single window mode is priceless. I don't use it to paint anymore ( I use mainly Krita ) ; I only use it for advanced image manipulation , and Gimp is really made for this.

# installing a remote package repository address  
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp  

# update the package repository list on your computer
sudo apt-get update  

# install the package updated , dependencies will follow
sudo apt-get install gimp

to update Gimp :

Gimp and the ppa will update at the same time you'll update your system.

Mypaint 1.1dev

On the actual source version, Mypaint got new tools ( straight line tools ) , and better management of the document frame ( not rounded to 64px anymore ) . Also, Mypaint put a first step in color management. A must compile , imo.
Note : if you installed a previous Mypaint version , uninstall it before from the software manager.

# preparing a folder for storing the sources 
cd 
mkdir sources 
cd sources

# installing dependencies 
sudo apt-get install git-core g++ python-dev libglib2.0-dev python-numpy swig scons gettext libpng12-dev liblcms2-dev
  
# download the last sources 
git clone git://gitorious.org/mypaint/mypaint.git

# enter the directory , compile and install. 
cd mypaint 
sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install

to update Mypaint :

# going to the sources folder cd ~/sources/mypaint/  
# update the sources 
git pull  

# recompile and install. 
sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install

Krita 2.5dev

On the actual source version, Krita have textured brush, layer composition , and new keyboard shortcut. Krita can be extremely hard to follow on the developpement, so do it if you are advanced user only. The install process is hard for the moment. Here is how to do ( using the script of Kubuntiac ) :

# preparing a folder for storing the sources 
cd 
mkdir sources 
cd sources 
mkdir krita 
cd krita  

# installing manually dependencies 
sudo apt-get build-dep calligra 
sudo apt-get install liblcms2-2 liblcms2-utils git xserver-xorg-input-wacom oxygen-icon-theme kde-runtime wget liblcms1-dev kdebase-runtime systemsettings qt4-qtconfig qtcurve libwpg-tools libwpd-tools poppler-utils opengtl-tools libcxxtools-dev 

# download the script 
wget http://krita.org/builder/calligra-creative_build-script.sh.tar.gz

#unpacking it with the right to execute 
tar -xzvf calligra-creative_build-script.sh.tar.gz

#remove the archive 
rm ./calligra-creative_build-script.sh.tar.gz 

# launch the script 
./calligra-creative_build-script.sh

# wait, it will be long.  
# In case of problem - it will probably happen -  ask for help on the script forum page.
# Note : Sometime when it breaks during compile, relaunching the script is a good idea 
# ( I had to do it on 2 install test )

post install fix :

# edit your profile file for a useful redirection 
kate ~/.profile  

# paste this two lines at the end 
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIRS:$HOME/sources/krita/calligra/calligra-inst 
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/sources/krita/calligra/calligra-inst/bin  

# reboot , Krita will be installed.

to update Krita :

# go on your source folder 
cd ~/sources/krita/

# launch the script again 
./calligra-creative_build-script.sh  

# wait, it will be long , but faster than first compile.  
# In case of problem - it will probably happen- ask for help on the script forum page again.

Bonus : the tester survival kit

With the last years using tools not stable in production, I gathered some useful information. What to do when an unstable software got a big bug or don't want to launch after an update. Stop doing artwork ? no.

Go back in time :

# go to the directory of your sources 
# identify the updates with git log 
git log  

# scroll to a older safe state in the commit and copy the commit number 
# ex : '30438af012555ee67a825ecc626a589cbdd999ce' of a week ago when all worked  
# tell git to go back in time at the commit address 
git checkout 30438af012555ee67a825ecc626a589cbdd999ce
  
# then compile again

Come back to the current dev :

# go to the directory of your sources 
git checkout master

# then compile again

Update : testing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ( main edition )

All the informations for tester I wrote above works also on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS main edition ( screenshot of my test , to proove it ) , and so , I guess it will be the same for Xubuntu and all *.buntu/Mint/gnome-shell based on this release. I tested it deeply and it would be to long to explain what I dislike in it, so I'm back to Kubuntu, but I wanted to let you know about the compatibility of my 'how-to'.

Conclusion :

I hope you liked it. I need to proof test it all of this on a new install. If you have good feedback, share it.
Now I'm back to my drawings .

Notes :
* : also read previous article on previous Kubuntu version : kubuntu 11-10 for digital painting

Krita project : an old challenge won

David REVOY — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:34:00 +0100

A part of the Krita team at the Krita Sprint 2011, Amsterdam in the Blender Institute. Photo Dmitry Kazakov

From Top left to bottom right: Adam Celarek, Silvio Grosso, Silvio Heinrich, Sven Langkamp, Boudewijn Rempt, David Revoy

José Luis Vergara Toloza, Dmitry Kazakov, Cyrille Berger, Bugsbane, Timothée Giet, Matus Talcik, Lukáš Tvrdý.

As you probably know I switched since 3 month mostly all my digital painting workflow to the open source Krita. The new Krita 2.4 will be out really soon now ( by the end of month ). So, in a near future, everyone will be able to install it with the regular package manager of his/her Linux distribution. Very exiting time to know it because Krita 2.4 is in my opinion ready for production work. But to reach this quality, the Krita team worked really hard. So, I wanted to blog a bit about an old Krita challenge and my relation with the project. Back on a bit of history ....

The not so old time

Remember the relatively not so old 'Sintel era' and how Krita looked at this time ? At this time ( around 3 years ago ) I used only Al.chemy, a branch version of Mypaint around 7.0, and Gimp-painter 2.6. I used this ones not because I knew only this ones ; no , I tested every solution available at this time, and this workflow was the only way to got my painting done.

At this same period, while the Sintel movie project started to get a little bit more popular I received an email from the Krita team asking why I didn't used their software.Krita. At this moment ( around version 2.2 ) Krita was far from my requirement, and I answered to this email my criticisms of what didn't works for my usage.

A challenge started

To my big surprise, I was very honored to read in our email discussion this full article : http://www.kdenews.org/2009/12/02/krita-team-seeking-sponsorship-take-krita-next-level ; I also received in my home studio Cyrille Berger who -by a good luck- worked on the same french city as me at this time. To quote from this article link above :

"Lukáš Tvrdý : It was about that time when I got in contact with David Revoy. He's the concept artist who has been working with the Blender team on Project Durian: their latest open source movie project. I asked him for his opinions on Krita to get some feedback from a professional. I like when people use my applications, and David has plenty of experience with various tools like GIMP and MyPaint. His opinions seemed very valuable to me for making Krita ready for actual users. ... He was willing to provide us with feedback on the issues he bumped into. So that's when we decided we should put a strong focus on getting Krita ready for him. If he can work comfortably with Krita, so will many other users, both casual users and professionals. ( Dec 2009 )"

So, at first I tried to be around the project , mainly on IRC reading the mailing list and trying to build weekly Krita, to bring test and feedback. During long period I launched Krita only once a week after my work just to try a speedpainting and see the improvement, comment about them. Then with time and after a lot of very cool features added by brillant developpers , I started to have a workflow including Krita in my tool set. At first , just to open a picture and take advantage of a unique Krita feature. Then more and more with bringing feedback, and with helps of other testers around Krita started to become more and more dominant to my workflow.

"Getting Krita ready for him"

I'm back from Mango 4th open movie pre-production where the Krita team did a wonderfull job remotely ironing bugs for 2.4 or including small workflow accelerators for storyboarding. For Mango concept art and storyboard I used mainly Krita 2.4 beta. And so, recently chatting about it and how good was Krita nowadays , Lukáš made me remember of this old 'challenge' from 3 years ago. So , congratz Krita team ! you won it !

2.5 started

Since last week the development of 2.5 started, and after month of bug fixing for 2.4, it's good to see again Krita open to new features. It's make me think to maybe start to blog post about new features here and redo short video tutorial because in less than a week Krita got the Composition layer done by Sven Langkamp , and Boudewijn Rempt is also working on making textured brush ( http://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?article107/textured-brush-in-floss-digital-painting ) . Mypaint also grew a lot, but not a lot of communication is done around. Here I will continue to stick to the 2.5 development and gives feedback and bugreport.

Every helps are welcome about testing and giving feedback ; it's almost impossible for the actual amount of tester to test everything in real time. Most of us ( me including ) test only the feature we use for our work or hobby. So cool if you can join around IRC, the forum, or the bugtracker to help the team increasing the quality of Krita.

Time for a next challenge ? ;-)

Digital open-source storyboard workflow

David REVOY — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:32:00 +0100

I'm currently hired on the Mango project in Amsterdam, the 4th open movie of the Blender Foundation ; and I keep posting artworks on the Mango blog but I also just posted a free tutorial article about the workflow of digital storyboarding with Krita.

For the tutorial on the Mango production blog , follow this link : http://mango.blender.org/artwork/digital-open-source-storyboard-workflow/

Linux Mint 12 for digital painter : auto-install-all script

David REVOY — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:41:00 +0100

If you follow my blog, you probably remember my long install notes to make a Linux Mint 11 for digital painting.

This time, Nathaniel Schultz published on his blog an epic masterpiece script to install all automatically :

How it works :

First, install a classic Linux Mint 12 ( here DVD, 64bit )
After the install , at the login screen use the top-right icon on the frame to login into the 'Mate' desktop environment
Install if necessary restricted driver for your Gfx card ( pop-up invite you ) , then reboot.
When all this is done , download and execute the script provided by Nathaniel inside a terminal ( link under )
Just let the script work, give your password or 'y' on request from time to time , take your time ; it took around 2 hours here
Done ! enjoy

Result :

Gimp-painter patched Gimp 2.7 beta ppa
Krita Git
Blender ppa
Mypaint ppa
*.ora and *.xcf thumbnails
... other utililities , ready menus and config ...etc....

✦ Download the script and read the full article here ✦

His article also explain each part of the instalation for those who want to add only a single component manually.

Many thanks for this amazing resources Nathaniel :-) Don't hesistate to test it , and give feedback to him. I tested it several time last days and It's now the system installed on my laptop , perfect to fly to the Mango open movie project :D

I un-activated the comment here, please comment, give feedback or share your opinion directly on Nathaniel's blog.