tutorial: Pencil to digital painting

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 01 september 2012 - 32 comments

![](data/images/blog/2012/09/2012-08-31_tutorial-a-floss-tree_blog.jpg) Note : a tutorial wrote in a single picture, made to be published on deviant art ( my Deviant Art account : [http://deevad.deviantart.com](http://deevad.deviantart.com/) ). I do a repost here to archive it on my blog/website. ## Erratum: - **update 2012-09-08 :** found an error, and commited new file with an erratum speech bubble at step '7' ; about the line art. This one got a better rendering in 'multiply'. The screenshot was done too early and show 'Normal' witch is an error. - **update 2014-07 :** The automagical F2 key in Krita to "save incremental" shortcut as been moved because F2 is used to rename in 90% of other software . Find the feature in File > Save Incremental version

Tree house

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 27 august 2012 - 5 comments

Still continuing test with a newer painting workflow ( same technic than previous post ) . This time over another old sketch to test organic landscape elements. I think I found great shortcut in the process to do faster digital painting with Gimp / G'mic / Krita / Mypaint on Linux , and adapt them well to my way to handle steps. I'll keep this technic for illustration, thats sure ; but for comics I changed my mind. I don't like really myself 'painted' comics. I think painting is great for illustration, but not enough 'graphic' to have a good flow of storytelling for comics / graphic novel frame. I need to find something else I'll post about it. larger resolution and print/poster [here](http://fav.me/d5clqfj "here" )

Finding Balance

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 24 august 2012 - 5 comments

Research and mockup design: Mypaint toolbar and icons

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 20 august 2012 - 13 comments

What's this ?

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 15 august 2012 - 13 comments

Themes for Krita and KDE

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 16 july 2012 - 25 comments

This resources became the default bright, dark and blender theme included in Krita 2.8 and newer versions . You probably don't need to install this. A small post to share the colors themes I did for the new feature of the next Krita 2.5 : changing the color theme on the fly. It's an advantage while painting to not get surrounded by a too bright user interface or get influenced by teinted warm or cold grey user interfaces. It's also confortable to have many choice and switch them according to your mood or type of work you need to do. ( ex: bright interface for line art or sketching , mid grey for precise color works , dark for late night working ...etc... ). **Download :** [krita-scheme.tar.gz](data/documents/krita-scheme.tar.gz) ( CC-0 ressources , public domain ) **To Install :** Extract the archive, and put the *.colors files inside <your-user-name-home>/.kde/share/apps/color-schemes folder. **To use :** Open Krita, and go in the top menu to_ Settings > Themes_ , and select one of the 6 theme with the prefix 'Krita'.

Review : Gimp-painter 2.7dev

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 28 may 2012 - 27 comments

portrait with stylisation test

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 26 may 2012 - 12 comments

Mypaint brushes for «l'heritage en couleur»

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 15 may 2012 - 16 comments

Volcano monster

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 14 may 2012 - 10 comments

Here is my contribution for the open project : _" 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](http://ancientbeast.com/gallery/ "gallery" ) . This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). 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 the webcomic «l'héritage en couleur»

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 08 may 2012 - 26 comments

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'](http://www.davidrevoy.com/article117/l-heritage-en-couleur "'l'heritage en couleur'" ) . ## 1\. Storyboarding ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/01-storyboard_by_David_Revoy.jpg) 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 ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/02-sketch-persp_by_David_Revoy.jpg) 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 ) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/03-inking_by_David_Revoy.jpg) 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 ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/04-grey-watercolor_by_David_Revoy.jpg) 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 ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/05-color-compositing-textures_by_David_Revoy.jpg) 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 :) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/3D-test-for-view-angles_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/3D-test-for-view-angles_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/concept-research_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/concept-research_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/digital-inking-and-watercolor-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/digital-inking-and-watercolor-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/digital-watercolor-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/digital-watercolor-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/first-concept_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/first-concept_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/first-sketch-2_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/first-sketch-2_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/first-sketch_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/first-sketch_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/inking-and-coloring-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/inking-and-coloring-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/inking-test-plus-watercolor_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/inking-test-plus-watercolor_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/inking-test_over-blue-printing_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/inking-test_over-blue-printing_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/speedpainting-mood-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/speedpainting-mood-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/speedpainting-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/speedpainting-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/speedpainting-test_very-textured_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/speedpainting-test_very-textured_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/style-research_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/style-research_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/test-full-grey-pencil_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/test-full-grey-pencil_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/test-no-inking-only-painting_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/test-no-inking-only-painting_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/textured-rendering-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/textured-rendering-test_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_1-colored_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_1-colored_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_1-pencil_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_1-pencil_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_1-real-inking-ballpen_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_1-real-inking-ballpen_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_2-test-mixed_page-format_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_2-test-mixed_page-format_by_David_Revoy.jpg) [ ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_3-penciling_by_David_Revoy.jpg) ](data/images/blog/2012/05/makingof/version-page_3-penciling_by_David_Revoy.jpg) 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'](http://www.davidrevoy.com/article117/l-heritage-en-couleur "'l'heritage en couleur'" ) . [update] : brush preset for Mypaint used on this project here :

L'héritage en couleur

WRITTEN_BY David REVOY - 05 may 2012 - 96 comments

![](data/images/blog/2012/05/0-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/1-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/2-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/3-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/4-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/5-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/6-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/7-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/8-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) ![](data/images/blog/2012/05/9-heritage-en-couleur_by_david_revoy.jpg) 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 which 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 : [making of published on my blog here](http://www.davidrevoy.com/article118/making-of-l-heritage-en-couleur "making of published here" ) \- 2013-04 : I received a Daily Deviation on deviantArt for this comic, thanks **links around the theme :** ( fr ) ( [google translate link](http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=fr&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.fr&sl=fr&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://www.le-nouveau-role-parental.fr/&usg=ALkJrhgdjWjjGb3OlT8dqUYCTeisjY7HYA "google translate link" ) ) **License :** [![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). **Source :** ( part 1 ) ( part 2 ) ( Hi-res open-raster file, layered, inside a zip archive ) **Support :** I'd love to have your support to help me fund and publish more open comics. [Please be my Patreon !](http://www.patreon.com/davidrevoy "Be my Patreon !" )