SLIGHT IMPROVEMENTS

This time, when I started sketching the line art, I wanted to reduce on time I spend on making art. I also had in mind that I will not compromise on quality. Keeping the learnings from my previous art in mind, I steered clear of those mistakes. I spent 20+ hours on this over a span of 2 weeks. I also ended up using lesser number of layers this time. And by less I mean 100+ :D

DEATH – DARKSIDERS 2 VIDEO GAME ART

Darksiders is a game set in a post apocalyptic world, where the kingdom of man is in peril as heaven and hell wage war for which earth is the battle ground. The story revolves around war, one of the four horsemen. Darksiders2, is built around Death, war’s brother and also, one of the four horse men.

It’s not a surprise that there is not much fan art of Darksiders2 in particular. The game sucked. Compared to it’s prequel, Darksiders2 was pretty much a disappointment. I still played the game though. Only for the art work in it. I especially loved all the boss designs. I even felt the design of Death is better than war. I looked up a lot of images of Darksiders2 on google for color reference.

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Death from Darksiders2. There are different types of armor sets that you can collect as you progress through the game. In this one, he’s equipped the Magus Cowl and wielding that monster size revolver whose name I don’t remember. Order a Limited Edition print of this image.

Currently this is adoring my computer as the wallpaper. Go ahead and download it for yourself. Just click on the image for a bigger resolution.

TECHNICALITIES

It’s not easy to put down 20+ hours of work flow in a step by step tutorial. I referred to a lot of tutorials on the internet and still I don’t get them exactly the way they describe. I learnt a little from here, some from there. Two artists on deviantart.com have been my inspiration though. Yue wang and Sandara Tang. I’m still trying to figure out a process here. But I guess there’s no single defined path to art. Everyone has their own style. I’ve been following a different art style for each of my art works so far. Any how, I will try to break it down as much as possible.

1) LINE ART
Building blocks of any art. Here’s what I did. I had trouble with the posture. It’s like he’s been thrown off in a fight, back wards, and he’s balancing himself, griping the ground with his claws and tearing it apart by his feet.

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2) BASE COLORING
To get a rough idea as to how the coloring is going to be, I’m going to add base colors using a hard brush. Need not be accurate at this point.

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3) DETAILING
This is the tough part. But also the fun part :) Here’s where we start adding life to the painting. I’m going to shade the base colors a bit more accurately and do a little more line art detailing. At this point I will also base color the background.

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4) ADDING TONES (HIGHLIGHTS AND SHADOWS)

Here’s where I used a different approach from my previous warrior princess art. Instead of shading and coloring the whole image at the same time I started doing it one item after the other. I used a different set of layers for every prop you see in the image. And I try to keep them in the order that is visible on the canvas. For example I keep the layers of the revolver in front of the left foot layer group. I started off with the magus cowl.

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5) THE TRICK OF BLENDING
I always keep my left on the keyboard when I paint. My thumb rests on the left alt key, and my fingers on the X and the D key. Because

• X helps you switch the foreground and background colors.
• D helps you bring king the foreground and background colors back to black and white. This particularly helps when you are shading and highlighting.
• Alt is the magic blender key (I like to call it) When you are painting with the brush, and you hold the alt button down, the brush tool becomes the eye drop tool (color picker). This way it’s easier to evenly shade various layers of lights nd shadows on the painting.

Using this technique is what I did the hair. Also the cowl. Pretty much the whole painting.

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6) FINISHING THE REST
Using the same technique for blending, I complete detailing the rest of the image.

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7) FINAL TOUCHES
Another fun part of the painting process. I’m going to paint the debris that is flying out from the impact and the lava that’s bursting out. To give a glowing effect, I’m going to use a soft edge brush and the lava burst with a bit of glow around it to show that they are emitting light. I will do the same thing on the metal surfaces to show a shiny glow.

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8) ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS
Now that the lava is emitting light, naturally some of the light is going to fall on the main character. Also we should keep in mind that this will also impact the brightness and color of the surfaces which are lit up by the bursting lava. Here’s how to deal with it.

• Add a layer and set the blend mode to soft light
• Select the same color as the lava
• Select a soft edge brush. Keep a moderate brush opacity (40-60%)
• Paint on the surfaces where the lava light will fall

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9) BACKGROUND
I will use the blending trick I mentioned in step 5 and do the back ground and the fore ground.

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10) FINISHING TOUCHES
Almost done. At this point I was just stating at what I’ve created and kept on pondering if I’ve anything more to do on this. I added some more debris near his foot. Darkened and lightened some outlines here and there, fixed colors spilling out or drawing in.

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AND THAT’S ABOUT IT

If I try to do anything more I will just end up messing it.

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Death from Darksiders2. Order a Limited Edition print of this image.

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MY FAVOURITE MOVIE!!!

This weeks’s challenge is also the name of my favorite animation, Up!! I mean, that movie is the only thing that came to my when I first saw the challenge. However, looking at the example given in the post, I’m sure images like these is what they meant.

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The Old LIC building on mount road, Chennai.

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HOWDY!!! IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME

Some of you who are seeing this post on wp.com may remember me. Some of you may not. For those that remember me, yes I’m back from the Other side. For those that don’t, doesn’t matter. Let me make a fresh start by saying a big HELLO :D to you.

Back in June 2012, I made a big move. I moved my blog from wp.com to wp.org. I’m sure you at this moment you are expecting me to say whether it was a good move or a bad move. Comparing the two platforms will be an endless yet a very interesting topic to debate on. But before we starting evaluating something, it’s always best to hear from both the sides. Because every coin, has two sides to it.

THE BASIC DIFFERENCE

What one must know is that I’m not a programmer. I don’t know squat about coding in HTML or CSS. Having said that, let me know start taking about the life that I experienced on the other side as a blogger.

wp.org is a self hosted platform. What is “self hosted” you ask? Let’s say that you have bought your self a piece of land. And there you decided to clear out the land, lay a foundation, and build your self a home. You take the help of a contractor or an engineer, an architect who give you a basic idea. Over which you further customize the plans, re shape it, mold it to a design that you always dreamnt of. That’s exactly is how self hosting feels like. The wp.org platform provides you with the basic tools of blogging. On which you use the various boat load of plugins available like disqus, wordpress SEO, jetpack, akismet. The customization that you can do to your website is just as vast as your knowledge in CSS and HTML coding. You are in complete control, with complete freedom. You are the boss.

wp.com on the other hand is not self hosted. WordPress is in control. If we take the same example as above, wp.com is the kind of contractor/engineer/architect who lets you customize your building plan. However, it will not accept anything and everything. It does not give you plugins, and does not give the complete freedom and independence that you experience in wp.org. What it does give, is a sense of security and a blogging community.

LIFE AT WP.ORG

If I have to summarize the it one word, I cannot think of any other word than “lonely”. But don’t take my word for it. I started blogging in Feb 2012. I made the move in June 2012. I was hasty and made this move too early. There are so many other self hosted blogs who have developed a community around themselves. May be they were not so hasty as I was. May be they are magic bloggers. But then again, one can’t say for sure. I thought I will have the best of both worlds. I thought that I will be able to experience the independence of wp.org while I enjoy the blogging community of wp.com. Well, I was wrong.

What ever may be the case, I will suggest (in my honest opinion) that every blogger must experience the wp.org platform. It’s like stepping into the real world, plugged out of the matrix. You will learn things which you can’t pick up in wp.com. If not, you will definitely learn to appreciate the comfort that wp.com has to offer.

HOW DID I MAKE THE MOVE

If you stumbled upon this post by searching for “how to move blogs in wordpress” or some other phrase hoping to find an answer on how to move your blog from wp.com to wp.org or vice versa, I’m sorry. I have no clue on how one can do it. To move from wordpress.com to wordpress.org, I paid for the guided transfer and a wordpress happiness engineer did it all for me. They were there to help me step by step and also supported me with trouble shooting for two weeks.  Coming back to wordpress.com didn’t cost me a dime. I just shouted out for help in wordpress.com support and a wordpress.com staff helped me move back.

A JACK OF ALL TRADES

Before making the move, I was a hard core street and HDR photographer. I even wrote tutorials on how I go about it. You can still find them in the tutorials menu. But the more I started exploring photoshop, the more I started exploring the art of creating images from a blank canvas. I started exploring digital art. And it realised that it is so deeply connected to what I used to love to do while I was a kid, drawing. I was drawing ever since I could hold a pencil. Even in schools, even during my college, while a class was in session, I would always draw a doodle or scribble a piece of pencil art in the last pages of my books.

I bought a wacom tab, and since then there has been no stopping to me learning digital art. Drawing on a digital canvas is not as same as drawing on paper. It’s a bit weird at the beginning. But by practice, I soon got the hang of it. So right now, I’m dabbling both in digital art and in photography, where digital is at the moment playing a dominant role.

WHILE I WAS IN WP.ORG

Here’s a list of things that I feel are worth sharing to show you what I had been doing while I was in wp.org.

DIGITAL ART

As I was saying, drawing digitally seems a bit weird at the beginning. I’ve arranged these art works of mine starting from my earliest, share-able work, to the latest. Click on the image to if you would like to download gigantic versions of them. I use most of them as wallpapers for my computer.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Like I said earlier, photography has been on the down low. I’ve been drawing, shooting, some times combining both the techniques into one piece of art. Photography requires time to go out, shoot and process later. Due to some changes that have happened in my professional life lately, I have not been able to devote enough time to shooting. I plan to make a backpacking trip in may, hope fully I should be able to scout out some good places to shoot. These are some of my photographs that I shot while I was in wp.org.

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These are a few good ones that I feel are worth sharing as a collection. More photos, more digital art, more tips, tricks and tutorials coming up. So, stay tuned, stay connected. :D

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EXACTLY WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR

The topic of this weeks’ photo challenge is something that I have been looking forward to these days. Escape, from my regular daily life, from my busy schedules of work, from all the physical, mental and financial stress. And my contribution aptly describes it. Like these birds, I want to escape and fly away from it all. At least for a few days.

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Escape!! Away from those snoopy photographers.

HOW I SHOT THIS

This is from this small village called Alamparai, which is abbout 150 kms away from Chennai. I was here with my other photographer friends for a photowalk. It turned out to be very adventurous. We had to take a boat from alamparai to reach the alampari fort across the shallow back waters. While returning we spotted these folk of birds and told that we ride towards them. We were all ready with our camera’s and just when they were about to fly away, I snapped this one with my Nikon L120.

You’ll find more shots from this photowalk here.

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STILL LEARNING

Some people have asked me to share a tutorial on making digital art. One of the facebook groups asked me to do a session on digital art during one their meet ups. I would love to share the knowledge that I have. That’s the main purpose of this blog. I wanted to share all that I know to a wider audience and not just limit it to the boundaries of facebook. But I need a lot more practice. I’m clear about the concepts, but I feel I have some short-comings when it comes to putting the knowledge to practice. I too have learned from various other artists and what I realised during the process is that every artist is unique. No two tutorials are similar to each other. All of them have their own approach. However, the concepts are similar.

I promise, once I feel I’m completely confident about the my style I will definitely share a full length tutorial on digital like I did for HDR and black and white photography.

CHAOS FORM CONCEPT

This piece is also inspired by the hack-and-slash game DARKSIDERS2. Like I have said before I love Death’s design better than War’s. While playing the game, the player fills up the chaos meter by slashing the enemies with various combos, which gradually fills the chaos meter. Once it’s completely full, the player can trigger the chaos form which is nothing else, but the reaper. This one here is death’s corporeal form and the one I have painted below is the ethereal, or like its called in this game, the chaos form. The player can unleash very heavy damage to the enemies and take very little damage in this form. Click on the image to download a high resolution version as a wallpaper.

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Death’s chaos form. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image.

TECHNICALITIES

I again ended up using close to 150 layers for this piece. I spent about 50 hours on this one at a stretch of 4 weeks. Because this time my focus was on detailing. So you see explaining the whole work flow step by step using screen shots will be very very complicated. But like I said, I will come up with a tutorial in future. Better yet may be I’ll make a speed art video. For now, here are the steps I used.

1. I used this screenshot from one of the youtube video as a reference to make the line art on a blank new layer at 8000 X 4500 resolution, which is basically the 16:9 resolution.
2. Below the line art layer, I created a new layer and named it base. Here’s where I did the base coloring. Here i just fill the color with a hard brush at 100% opacity. No need to be very careful at this point. Just fill in the colors like you used to do in your coloring book back in the art classes during which you attended during school.
3. Now comes the hard part, detailing. But it is also my favourite part, because here is where you add life to the image my giving it a 3D illusion.
4. Create a new layer on top of the sketch layer.
5. Assume a light source and start painting highlights and shadows. Here I use a round brush at 50% opacity. I start painting the shadowed area using black lightened area using white and gradually reduce the intensity as I move to the center of the spot that I’m currently coloring.
6. Once I’m done doing this for all the parts of the image I create a new layer on top of all the existing layers and I added a bit of texture using various texture brushes on the mountain, the scythe blade and the walls.
7. I added the clouds
8. I now flatten the image to add final touches.
9. For finishing touches, I added a lens vignette using nik colour efex and sharpened the over all image using smart sharpen tool from filters menu.

I used sandara tang’s brush set to do this painting.

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CATCHING UP WITH PHOTOGRAPHY

It’s been a long time since I have posted a photograph. I’ve been spending so much time delving into digital art that it’s taking up maximum of my available time. But today I thought let’s keep it aside and go back to that which actually made me get into photo editing to Photoshop to digital art. I did some shots last month at Pondicherry with my relatives and also some with an old friend at Alamparai. I opened those archives and started sorting the photographs. This bunch should keep me coming back to editing for sometime. However, for now here’s a picture from my recent trip to Alamparai fort.

SHORES OF ALAMPARAI

It was a 3 hour bike ride up and 3 down, which means I rode up to 6 hours that day. We started off at 4 in the morning from Adyar and reached Alamparai around 7am. We took a boat ride to the fort. I shot this after docking at the fort.

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The shores of Alamparai fort. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image.

TECHNICALITIES

A few weeks ago my friend who recently got into photography, got a Nikon D700 (i guess) and was showing some of his photos on my computer. When I showed him how the pictures could be enhanced by using some simple editing steps on some of his pictures he said “I don’t know, I feel like cheating”, I said “I feel like god”. :D

I love this ability of taking something not so special and turning into something which, at least closely, can be related to art. This picture for example. You wouldn’t beleive me if I said that this one here is the original shot. I took this with my Nikon L120.

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Yes, I’m not kidding. This is the original.

To this, I add these simple steps.

1. I corrected the horizon using the using the ruler tool with the horizon of the shore as reference.
2. Then I cropped out the unwanted areas using the crop tool. Crop tool is easy. Click on the crop tool icon, click and drag across the image to make selection, hit enter.
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3. Then the rest of the magic is done in Nik Silver Efex. Navigate to this plugin from this menu.
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4. Then apply these changes to from the right hand side menu in the plugin.
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5. Hit the ok button at the bottom right corner of the window and you’re done.

AND THAT’S ABOUT IT

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Order a limited Edition print of this image.

Actually, these are the steps that make up 90% of my black and white processing technique. Click on the link to learn about it in detail.

You can see that there’s almost nothing that I have done here. Just cropping, and simple tweaks in a plugin, to make ordinary look extraordinary.

UPDATE

I shared this post with my friend with whom I had gone shooting to this place. He confirms it’s Nikon D7000. :)

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WILL IT BLEND?

When I used to see digital paintings, my mind would just be blown to bits thinking about how the hell do people give such a smooth color gradation? Because, at that point of time I wasn’t even aware that there’s such a thing called drawing tablets that help you draw and paint stuff directly on the computer. Until I figured out the method of doing it, I used to think only people who are very versatile at using the gradient tool and layers must be able to do this. I was wrong.

WHAT IS COLOR BLENDING?

Blending or mixing of two different colors is very important in paintings as it helps produce a new shade and a smooth transition from one color to another. This is what separates the paintings from flat colored images.

I will need to spend a lot of time in writing and showing the various steps of how paintings are created from scratch. However, color blending is what forms the major part of my painting processes. If you are good at making like sketches, and you already own a drawing tablet, I’m sure you can start doing paintings just by seeing this tutorial.

Once you master this technique, you should be able to do paintings like how I do.

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Death, the main character of Darksiders2.

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Warrior Princess (OC)

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Death’s Chaos form

THINGS YOU WILL NEED

To achieve color blending you should have the the following with you.

1) Adobe photoshop (or any other software like gimp or paint tool sai where you can use layers and control brush opacity)
2) A drawing tablet. Because using a tablet is where you will be able to easily control the intensity of your brush much like how you would do with a real brush, pen or pencil. You can try this tutorial even with your mouse but the process is going to be tedious and the out out will not have the finish which you will get by using a drawing tablet.

Ready? Let’s go.

COLOR BLENDING TUTORIAL IN PHOTOSHOP

THE CANVAS

Lets start by preparing the canvas.

Mac users, I’ve never used one and I’m not sure how the keys are named in a mac key board. But I’m pretty sure ctrl key in windows is cmd key and alt is opt key in mac.

Hit ctrl+n, and in the resulting window set the dimensions for your canvas. For practice, let’s start with a simple 1000X1000 pixels image. Also, make sure you have selected the background contents to be white.

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Hit Enter and your you will see that a white sheet is loaded.

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But don’t just start painting yet. Before you proceed you must understand how layers work in photoshop. A little bit.

When you start painting straight away, you are painting directly on the while color of the canvas. That means, at any point of time if you feel like erasing something, you will not only erase what you painted, but you will also erase the white color of the canvas.

Therefore, to erase only what you painted and to preserve the canvas, add a new layer on top. To do this, hit ctrl+shift+n on your key board, and hit enter in the following window. Oh yes, make sure the color is set to “none”.

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You will see that in the layers panel, a new layer has been placed on your base canvas (background) layer.

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Like I’ve shown in the above screen shot, make sure that this new layer is selected.

THE PREP

Now on this layer, use the hard brush at 100% opacity to place two color spots of two different colors next to each other with a little bit of gap in between them. I’m going to select red and blue.

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Use that one which is highlighted

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And place two spots of colors

THE BLENDING

No it’s time to start blending the colors. Select this brush which you will find in the default brush presets (the highlighted one).

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And set brush opacity to 30%

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I normally set the brush to 30-50% when I work on my paintings but I recommend playing around with this setting to see what works best.

Now press and hold the alt key, you will see that this turns the brush tool into the color picker tool. Use this tool to select the red color and slowly paint a path towards the blue spot.

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You will that when you painted the red color on the blue spot, it produced a new shade. Now I’m again going to use the alt key, to select the new shade and continue painting.

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Do you see how this works? Notice how the colors are starting to blend in the center. I will continue to quickly switch between picker and the brush tool and keep on coloring.

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Spend some good time time picking the colors from various spots and continue smoothing as you leave a path of a new color shade between the two primary colors.

Alt key is the golden short cut key when you are blending colors. It will drastically speed up the coloring process by eliminating the need of constantly switching between the brush and the color picker tool from the tools menu on left.

Practice will make you perfect. Aim at getting a smooth texture, like a gradient between the two colors. It will take some time but you will soon get the hang of it.

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ROSE CONCEPT

I don’t know what is it with me and women blooming out of a flower with fantasy wings. Even when I was trying come up with the basic sketch of my earlier paintings, I would wander through ideas but still some how end up thinking about women blooming out of a flower with fantasy wings. I hope such kind of attraction is fairly normal. Anyhoo, this happens only during the thought process of making paintings, so I guess it’s ok. Or is it….?

Here’s my newest painting, Rose, which portrays a woman blooming out of a flower with fantasy wings.

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Rose. Order a limited edition Print of this painting.

TECHNICALITIES

When I started painting this one I wanted to speed up the process. I’m pretty clear about the work flow now. I start with the sketch layer, then base color layers under the sketch layer, lighting and shadow layers on top of the sketch layer, smoothing and detailing on top of the lighting and shadow layer, did the background, finishing touches and minute detailing here and there as the top most layer, then make a copy of this file and flatten the image, make some over all contrast, brightness, saturation etc etc.. adjustments, sharpen the final image, save as jpeg and then…viola!! To put all that in perspective…

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Digital painting layer arrangement that I follow in photoshop.

But it doesn’t meant that I also do the layers in this exact same order. I tend to shift between the layers as I move on, doing the painting depending on how my thoughts wander. But in the layer arrangement panel, this is how I stack them.

You will also notice that the lighting and shadows layer is what forms the major part of the painting. Here’s where you add life to your painting. You can make it look pretty much 3D like if you spend good time on it and do this layer correctly. Also, here’s where I use the color blending technique.

I need a lot more practice. I should keep going at it. May be speed will develop eventually.

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ONE ART CAPTURES THE OTHER

That’s the best part of being an artist. You can express a master piece by recreating it and presenting it in your own art. And photography does it in the best possible way. Today’s WordPress Photo challenge is just that.

This is a shot of a tibetian monastery, located in Bylakuppe. A small village which is halfway between Bangalore and Mysore.

You can find more shots of this monastery, the interior prayer hall and some of the monks there in here.

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The Bylakuppe Golden Temple. Get a Limited Edition Print of this image.

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BEEN A REALLY REALLY REALLY LONG TIME!!!

When I logged back into my blog, I saw the last post was some where in august 2013. It’s been such a long time since I came back here again. A lot has happened in my life since then. There were ups and downs and some mediocre things that happened during this time in my life. But I am glad to say that the ups overwhelmed all the other things.

The biggest change that I went through was my wedding. Yes, I got married to the love of my life. Her name’s Kaneeza.

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I did a collage of some best shots of us. The one in the top-middle and the one in the bottom right are the selfies we took during our honey moon in bangkok. I have framed this one and it now adores a wall in our bedroom.

We started talking in october last year. Pretty soon we admitted our love to each other and also told our parents that we want to get married. Guess the wedding date…? Feb14 ;). There were few other changes that went on, like changing my residence, but the wedding was the biggest and the bestest change ever :). And during all this chaos, I did not get any time at all to focus on painting and digital art.

COLOSSAL CHARACTER CONCEPT

So I tried drawing this giant T-rexy kinda ferocious cat character. This was my first attempt at drawing something colossal. After such a huge gap, painting digitally almost seemed to me as if I was starting to learn it from scratch. But I got the hang of it as I went on completing.

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Intruder Alert!!! I felt kinda rusty when I started this. But at the end, glad to know that I’ve still got it. Order a Limited Edition print of this artwork.

While I completed this one, I learnt two things.

• Just a colossal character is not enough, you need to have supporting miniature characters in it to show the massiveness of the character by comparision
• Practice makes perfect. No matter what, keep at it or you loose touch.

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BACK TRACKING

There are a lot of photos which I had processed some time ago. I hadn’t posted them during the long break which I took from blogging. I was digging up and just going through some of my old shots and found something which I hadn’t shared before. And was also worth sharing. This is the shot of a vendor which I shot at a market place 3 years ago, back when I used to stay in that vicinity.

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The pear man. He was selling these USA pears.

Also I just remembered. He gave me a couple of pears when I returned to give him a printed copy of this. May be he was just happy at the fact that I even showed up after a week of taking this photo just to give a print of it.

TECHNICALITIES

This kind of processing is called selective colouring. In phtoshop, it’s just a matter of placing the black and white copy of the image on top of the colour image, layer mask the two and poke through the black and white layer to reveal colour where needed. Quite a simple technique really.

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THE PHOTOWALK

Today was a very productive Sunday. Unlike my other Sunday’s, this one started very early, at 4.15am. And at about 5, our gang of photostrophers started out for a really long drive to Mahabalipuram. This is small town about 100kms away from Chennai.

The main purpose of this photowalk was to capture sport action shots of the surfers. Some of the members who had gathered there caught some really awesome shots of the surfers.

THE TRAGEDY

I forgot to put the memory card in my L120. Can you believe that!?!? I had cleaned it up the previous night of the shoot and left it in the computer. I felt like kicking myself. However, the bright side was that I could take 20 shots which would be saved in the limited built-in memory of my camera. So had to carefully choose those 20 shots. Help did come a bit later. I’ll tell you more about it some other time. First, the first picture of the photowalk.

SMILE… IT’S CONTAGIOUS

However a smile effects any one, it’s going to touch them in a positive way. I had taken less than 10 steps after I took out my gear and mounted it. That’s where I saw this lady. She was talking to some kids there. She had a pretty smile. I didn’t have any second thoughts to ask her to pose for me. I went up to her and asked for a picture. And she agreed, with a smile. I showed the picture, with a smile. She thanked me and said “romba cleara iruku (It’s so very clear)”, with a bigger smile. :D

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The first shot of this photowalk. It’s the smile that made it the first one. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image.

And I couldn’t stop Just at that. I wanted to take a close-up shot of that pretty Smile. And she obliged for another shot. that’s when I got this one.

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A close-up shot of her. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image.

TECHNICALITIES

The original shots are not impressive at all. I shot them using my Nikon L120. But don’t blame the poor camera. It’s just that I don’t care much about iso, white balance, blah blah blah when I shot. And my street will not be patient with me every time when I want to change the exif. Their smiles might turn into frowns. I just shoot with my instinct. Rest of the magic happens during processing.

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I had a hunch these will turn out well when I remove the colour. And so I did the black and white processing using my same old nik silver efex. I already have two tutorials here that describe my black and white processing. You can them out here and here. These tutorials show how exactly I use Nik Silver Efex to tact fully remove colour from my images. I’m going to go over this one real quick.

WORK FLOW

So here’s what I did

1. The first thing I noticed after opening the image is the tilt. I fixed it using the straightening tool.
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2. Now to remove the colour, I started the nik silver efex plugin.
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3. I increased the structure to a 100 and that’s it at this point.
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4. This gave me a flat but a much detail image. The back ground is still too bright and is distracting the eye away from the user.
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5. I re opened it in Nik silver efex and this time I tweaked the layers and curves graph.
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6. This gave me an image with a darker back ground, but it even made the subject go dark.
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7. So at this point we have an image with the subject well exposed, and an image with the back ground well exposed. We are going to select the best parts of these two images and put them in one to get a better image. That’s where Layer masking comes in.
8. Every time an image is processed in Nik, it gets loaded on to the previous image as a new layer. They all pile up in the layer mask panel. Layer mask the dark image on the bright image.
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9. Select the brush tool and set the brush opacity to 30%. And paint over the dark areas of the subject to brighten them up.
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   The reason why the brush tool opacity is set to 30 % is it will help you gradually brighten up the spot rather than completely revealing the flat image underneath.
10. At any point if you feel you over did the brushing, just erase it with the eraser tool, select brush again, and pick up from where you had left.
11. When you are happy with masking, merge the two layers.
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12. Now open the Nik Colour Efex plugin and add the lens vignette filter. These are the settings I used.
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    Hit the “ok” button at the botton right corer of the screen.

AND THAT’S ABOUT IT

So there. Honestly, yet again, I have not even used 10% of what photoshop has to offer. Just the two Nik plugins and a bit of layer masking.

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Final processing out put.

I have used the same technique on the second image as well. You should have guessed it by the out put of the image. The lighting conditions and the position in which I took the second is just the same. The only difference is I zoomed in for the close-up.

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MAHABALIPURAM BEACH

This is a retreat spot at about 100km from chennai. It’s a long drive along the East Coast Road. This is the first shot that I took of the beach when I reached there. You can see the old temple in the background. My focus here however, were these rocks. And I wanted to bring that out in the image. And so I used the concept of tilt shift to bring the focus on the rocks.

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Seashore of the Mahabalipuram beach. That’s the Mahabalipuram temple far away in the background. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image,

TECHNICALITIES

The processing done here is HDR. I took 3 images at -2,0,2ev and merged them using Nik HDR Efex. I have a detailed tutorial on HDR right here. Here I’m just going to quickly go through what I have done to get the Out put.

TOOLS YOU NEED

• Photoshop, I have CS5
• Nik Silver Efex
• Nik HDR Efex

WORKFLOW

Let’s take a look at the originals first. I mounted my Nikon L120 on my tripod and shot 3 bracket images at  -2,0,2ev.

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These shots hardly make any sense. There are parts of these three image which are their best. We are going to merge the best parts in one single photo.

So Here’s what I did

1) MERGE IN NIK HDR EFEX

Using photoshop bridge, I loaded the images in Nik HDR EFEX. The plugin will start mixing and churning the 3 image and throw up a flat image which just has the best parts exposed parts of each image in it. I made these adjustments to the image in the plugin.

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Hit the “OK” button at the bottom right corner of the screen and the image will be loaded back in photoshop with these changes. At this point the image will look something like this.

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2)NOISE CORRECTION

You will notice that the sky has some ghosts noise in it (Eeek). What I meant was there are multiples of it in the image. This is one common problem while doing HDR with sky in the Background. It keeps moving and there’s a difference in positioning from one image to another.

I’m going to use the original 0ev shot to correct this. I’ll layer mask the original shot over the HDR image. And paint over the noisy areas with the brush tool to reveal the noise less sky.

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Also There’s a lot of unwanted foreground and sky in the background. I’m going to crop it out using the crop tool.

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2) BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION

This was a sudden choice. I rarely do Black and white in HDR images. I some how felt this would look even better in black and white. And for all my black and whites I use nik silver efex. But first I need to merge these layers. To merge layers, hold the ctrl button (cmd for mac) and click on the layers in the layers panel to select them. Then right click and select merge layers

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Then I Select the nik silver efex plugin from the filter menu. And I Applied these settings to it.

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THAT’S ABOUT IT

Once you hit the OK button you will have the final out put like this.

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Final out put image.

I quickly went through here describing what setting I had used in the Nik plugins to get the final out put. I have detailed tutorials on HDR processing using Nik HDR Efex and Black and White Processing using Nik Silver Efex. Do take a look.

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THE PHOTOWALK

This is a shot from the previous photowalk at Mahabalipuram beach. Where a group of us photographers shot to capture some exciting beach surfing moments. Most of the others captured some awesome surfing action. While I was rather doing that which I love the most in photography, portraits and HDR.

KIDS AT THE BEACH

While walking down towards the sea  there’s this narrow street through which we had to pass through. There were a lot of houses, shops and hotels to be seen on the way. That’s where I saw these kids. They were talking to some women there. They all must’ve been family, or just neighbours. I went up to the kids and asked for a picture. Very shyly, after a little persuasion from the women there, they agreed to pose. That’s when I got this.

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Nalini, Durga and Janaki. I’m not sure of two names but I’m sure the little one in the middle is Durga. Order a Limited Edition Print of this image.

TECHNICALITIES

Nothing complex in this shot. The procesing done here is very simple and I did it all in Nik Silver Efex. I increased the structure to 100%, tweaked down the levels and curves graph a teeny little bit, and added vignette.

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LET THE PARROT SHOW THE FUTURE

I have seen enough Hollywood movies to know how the fortune teller has a studio set up with all sorts of tripy lights and decorations with that smokey ball on the table and stuff. Things are more simpler in chennai. All we have to do is take a walk to their nearest beach, and we will have dozens of fortune tellers waiting for us. There are many ways they do the fortune telling. One common method is with the help of a parrot. Yeah you read it right, a goddamn parrot.

What happens is you first pay the fortune teller. Then, they let out this parrot from its cage. The parrot trots towards a pile of cards and then picks a card (or two or three, I don’t know) from a deck of tarot cards. And the fortune teller then comprehends the parrot’s selection.

This is the shot of one such fortune teller. He was drinking his tea when I went up to him. He quickly gulped down his tea and was kind enough to oblige when I asked him for a shot.

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The fortune teller at besant nagar beach.

TECHNICALITIES

A part from my regular black and white processing technique probably the only two different things that I have done here are the RAW adjustments and the texture that I finally added to it in darken layer mode. I shot the original image using my 50mm prime at f/1.8, 1/640sec, ISO100.

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CHILLI BAJJI

I think chilli bajji’s are the best of all the bajji’s. BTW, for those who are wondering what chilli bajji’s are, it’s those big red or green chillies, dipped in gram flour batter and deep fried. Even more awesome with chilli sause or pudina chutney. And when you are at the beach, it’s pretty much a tradition that you do not return without savoring one of these. At least it is for me. :)

THE BAJJI WALA

He was actively serving bajji’s to his customers. I almost hesitated to go ask him for a shot because I thought I might be an interruption. But as a guy who loves capture expressions on film I also felt compelled to get a shot of his enthusiastic visage. I was rather surprised at the way he co-operated with me to take his picture. From all the shots that I hastily snapped to let him get back to his work, I think this is the best one.

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I took some more shots of him, some candid ones too. I have yet to process them I will post them later.

TECHNICALITIES

I shot this at 1/1000th of a second, f 1.8, ISO 640 using my Nikon D3300 mouting my 50mm prime. After making RAW adjustments, I moved on to processing it in nik silver efex.

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

MAHABALIPURAM BEACH

This is a retreat spot at about 100km from chennai. It’s a long drive along the East Coast Road. This is the first shot that I took of the beach when I reached there. You can see the old temple in the background. My focus here however, were these rocks. And I wanted to bring that out in the image. And so I used the concept of tilt shift to bring the focus on the rocks.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

TECHNICALITIES

The processing done here is HDR. I took 3 images at -2,0,2ev and merged them using Nik HDR Efex. I have a detailed tutorial on HDR right here. Here I’m just going to quickly go through what I have done to get the Out put.

TOOLS YOU NEED

• Photoshop, I have CS5
• Nik Silver Efex
• Nik HDR Efex

WORKFLOW

Let’s take a look at the originals first. I mounted my Nikon L120 on my tripod and shot 3 bracket images at  -2,0,2ev.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

These shots hardly make any sense. There are parts of these three image which are their best. We are going to merge the best parts in one single photo.

So Here’s what I did

1) MERGE IN NIK HDR EFEX

Using photoshop bridge, I loaded the images in Nik HDR EFEX. The plugin will start mixing and churning the 3 image and throw up a flat image which just has the best parts exposed parts of each image in it. I made these adjustments to the image in the plugin.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Hit the “OK” button at the bottom right corner of the screen and the image will be loaded back in photoshop with these changes. At this point the image will look something like this.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

2)NOISE CORRECTION

You will notice that the sky has some ghosts noise in it (Eeek). What I meant was there are multiples of it in the image. This is one common problem while doing HDR with sky in the Background. It keeps moving and there’s a difference in positioning from one image to another.

I’m going to use the original 0ev shot to correct this. I’ll layer mask the original shot over the HDR image. And paint over the noisy areas with the brush tool to reveal the noise less sky.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Also There’s a lot of unwanted foreground and sky in the background. I’m going to crop it out using the crop tool.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

2) BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSION

This was a sudden choice. I rarely do Black and white in HDR images. I some how felt this would look even better in black and white. And for all my black and whites I use nik silver efex. But first I need to merge these layers. To merge layers, hold the ctrl button (cmd for mac) and click on the layers in the layers panel to select them. Then right click and select merge layers

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Then I Select the nik silver efex plugin from the filter menu. And I Applied these settings to it.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

THAT’S ABOUT IT

Once you hit the OK button you will have the final out put like this.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

I quickly went through here describing what setting I had used in the Nik plugins to get the final out put. I have detailed tutorials on HDR processing using Nik HDR Efex and Black and White Processing using Nik Silver Efex. Do take a look.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

CALLED IT AS I SAW IT

I have no idea if that’s what he is supposed to be, I don’t even know if that’s what he does there, he didn’t even start the motor. I just saw him step in and step out of this shed like contraption and I saw that there’s a motor in there and so that’s who I think he is. I know I know I’m judging a book by it’s cover here. But, I’m running out of captions for my posts and images.

THE MOTOR OPERATOR

I caught this while strolling on the beach with my camera. The moment I shot this and reviewed it on my camera screen, I turned back and started walking in the other direction. Because from his expression, I am pretty sure he would have come over to punch me in the face if I had lifted up my camera for another shot.

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Thing is, and I will be brutally honest here, you need to grow some balls to do street photography. Even more so, when you are trying to shoot candid. Most people don’t welcome the idea of being shot. However, there are some who like it when people show attention towards them and take their picture. They might even pose for you when they notice that you are trying to take their picture. Yes, that has happened to me.

TECHNICALITIES

Exif: F/4, 1/640sec, ISO250

I pushed the clarity slider to the max and brightened up the shadows too. Then did some minor corrections to the other RAW sliders. After that I went on to doing my regular black and white processing using the nik silver efex plugin.

I normally do not explain my processing techniques in detail on my posts because, that’s just repetitive and makes the post unnecessarily lengthy. However, do feel free to call up the main menu from the top right corner and go through stuff there. I have curated those posts and pages in which I have written my processing techniques in there. And if you have any questions, do let me know. I will be more than happy to answer them. :)

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IT’S A BOY!!!

Before I begin I want to share with you the biggest event of my life. My wife gave birth to a handsome baby boy on the 5th of this month. I couldn’t update any sooner because of all the things that I had to get settled with the hospital and stuff. She just returned home today. Both the new mom and my little boy are doing great!! :)

BALLOON FIRING

The concept is simple. You will have balloons stuck to a make shift wall made of wood and cotton to which balloons are stuck. The there’s an air rifle that shoots pellets which earlier used to be made of metal, but these days its plastic. They charge you for 10 shots, you burst as many balloons as possible. I first shot his picture. Then later thought why not shoot some balloons too while I am at it.

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TECHNICALITIES

I shot this one at 1/1000sec, ISO220, f/1.7. Then later I did a little bit of adjustments while converting it to gray scale in the raw pre-processor in photoshop and then did some final touches in nik silver efex.

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BETTER THAN CANDID

Candid and staged photography are the way I would further categorize street photography. I love approaching people, asking for a shot, taking my time to compose and then taking a picture rather than candid. Yeah yeah, I know you would say candid expressions tell a story, capture real expressions and all, it’s true. However, its more fun when you actually approach people. Some are shy, some are ready and some will plain reject you. But you will meet a lot of different people from different walks of life. Plus it gives them time to pose the way they want, the way they feel they look good.

THE SILENT STARE

I tried hard to make this guy laugh but I just couldn’t. All he did was stare at me like this.

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TECHNCALIITES

I shot this one at 1/640sec, f/1.8, ISO110.

For processing, I did nothing in the raw pre processor. All the magic has been done in nik silver efex. I love the ability of editing highlights, mid tones and shadows which the nik silver efex offers in editing brightness, contract and structure. Gives a unique touch to the output images.

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