Tag Archives: Dmitry Kazakov

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Muses: a new Krita Training DVD by Ramon Miranda

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Following the succesful “Comics with Krita” DVD by Timothee Giet (now sold out!), and supported by the Krita Foundation, Ramon Miranda has started working on the second Krita training DVD: Muses. Let yourself be inspired by Ramon’s Muses, and learn how to paint wonderful and evocative images from a professional artist.

The DVD will have more than three hours of HD video focused on creating digital illustrations from scratch to the final print, including

  • An explanation of Krita’s gui and the best way to setup Krita for maximum productivity and fun. Ramon will demonstrate a solid and productive workflow.
  • Creating interesting new brush presets, working with layers, masks and filters. color in theory and practice and an introduction to styles in art.
  • Creating an illustration from scratch: creating the ideas to begin with, sketching, getting into the flow, blocking, shading and values, painting a face, finishing the artwork with color and effects, printing considerations.

“Muses” will come with a full set of brushes and brush presets, icons ready to use with your own presets and much more. The voice over will be in English and Spanish, with unobtrusive pop-over messages for extra clarity.

Muses — the color sketch for the projected DVD cover

You can pre-order the DVD now from the Krita Foundation. If you do not wish to use paypal, contact foundation@krita.org for alternative payment methods. Pre-ordering the DVD will help support Krita development. Currently, Dmitry Kazakov is being sponsored by the Krita Foundation to work on improved mask handling, performance and much more. The contents of the DVD will also be released as Creative Commons.

The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.

Muses: Painting with Krita DVD
Special pre-order price including shipping and V.A.T: €27.50

And everyone who pre-orders will be credited on the DVD, too.

Ramon Miranda is an illustrator from Spain who has been using open source tools professionally for a long time. He is well known for his instruction videos, his beautiful art and his work on Gimp Paint Studio.

If you are at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid, you will be able to meet Ramon.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

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The London Expedition

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Thursday, 21st March, David Revoy, Boudewijn Rempt and Inge Wallin took a plane to London to visit Double Negative. Double Negative is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, VFX studio in London. We were invited by Simon Legrand, who works as a technical director at Double Negative. Simon has been using Krita for his work in a previous studio on G.I. Joe 2 and other unreleased titles, and he had invited us there, to meet with him and his colleagues from the industry.

On Thursday, we sat down with Simon and looked at ways Krita can be integrated in a VFX pipeline — we’re already doing pretty good, with OpenColorIO and OpenEXR support, but things could be better, still. Deep integration with Nuke, dynamic, file-based layers, an Adobe Bridge like image manager — which made us think of Gwenview or Dolphin. In the evening, we sat down with Andrew Harvey from Reliance Mediaworks, formerly Digital Domain London where Simon made extensive use of Krita previously.

David, Boudewijn, Inge and Simon in the Double Negative lobby

Next day, Inge, as a representative of KO GmbH, started working on prices and support offerings, while Boudewijn started hacking on the file-based layers feature.

In the afternoon, Gavin Graham from Double Negative hosted a meeting in the Double Negative offices. He is a head of 3D at Double Negative. It was an awesome experience to present Krita to him and a room full of artists from different departments — matte painters, texture painters, concept artists.

David gave live demos on a big screen of the features these people were asking for — and sure, there were some wishes, like better cloning/healing, improved masking (which Dmitry Kazakov, sponsored by the Krita Foundation is already working on!), but it was great to see how well Krita already supports the needs of the VFX industry!

A great meeting was followed by an impressive tour of the Double Negative offices, room after darkened room full of people totally focused on the next blockbuster movie.

Inge, Boudewijn and David in the Double Negative Office

Inge, Boudewijn and Gavin in the Double Negative Office

Finally, on Friday night we went to a night club (first time in my life!) to meet with people from The Foundry. Nuke looks like a prime candidate to integrate with Krita, and now we only have to figure out how to do that…

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

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Krita around the web

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A quick batch of cool links while I’m in London with David Revoy and Inge Wallin, “studying the VFX industry” — learning a lot, actualy, about why Krita is awesome as part of a VFX workflow, and what can be better… And there is already work being done on features that are important for texture artists and matte painters”

Sponsored by the Krita Foundation, Dmitry Kazakov has improved the Color to Alpha filter beyond all recognition. His work was mentioned before on this website, but check out his blog to see what can be done to sweeten Tears of Steel.

Lukáš Tvrdý, a previous recipient of sponsored development, started working on improving support for texturing, implementing a layer offset tool. Read all about it on his blog and watch the cool demo video.

Two weeks ago, the Krita team assembled in the Linux Hotel in Essen-Horst. Sven Langkamp gives a report on his blog. Work on what has been discussed is already going on — though obviously, we could use more helping hands. So if you want to be part of a fun, open, welcoming project, check out the Join Krita page Valerie created!

And while I don’t think that we’re really competing with Gimp — Krita and Gimp have quite different target audiences, an article like this one by Carla Schroeder is always nice to read.

And did you know that Krita has already been used on real feature movies? I saw some actual footage yesterday. Awesome! It’s always inspiring to see work done with Krita — like David’s warm-up images, or Ramon Miranda’s landscapes.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

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Focus on Transformations

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This month, Dmitry Kazakov is spending all his time on the transformation code in Krita. That’s the code that does the scaling, rotating, shearing and so on. We always felt that the current situation wasn’t all that bad, but a host of bug reports on transformations told us differently!

So, January is Transformation Month! And while not committed yet, Dmitry is already showing some really nice progress in improving the quality of the transformations.

This is a comparison between the old bicubic scaling and the new. Make sure you set your browser to 100% zoom, otherwise, weirdness will happen!

And this shows off how much nicer the rotation interpolation has become:

The Krita Foundation is support Dmitry in this work — and you can help the foundation support Dmitry!

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE