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Month: November 2021

Kolavai Lake Chengalpattu

Kolavai Lake Chengalpattu

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A painting of Kolavai Lake, Chengalpattu, using Krita with my XP-Pen Artist 10s.

Kolavai Lake Chengalpattu

Yet another landscape painting in Krita. I downloaded Krita 5 beta 2 to try out some of its new features. Though I tried the new brushes (RGBA brushes and the water colour brushes) I found the strokes to be extremely laggy on my laptop to the extent that I couldn’t create a painting with them. Maybe in future, when I get a more powerful laptop, I might use these brushes. For now, this painting is created using the default “Paint” set brushes.

Kolavai lake is a lake near Chengalpattu in Tamil Nadu and is a beautiful location. It is a major source of water for the nearby districts and is an ecologically sensitive area. I had already painted this beautiful lake a long time ago.

Landscape painting – Temple tank

Landscape painting – Temple tank

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After a few portraits, I usually feel the need for something different. So here it is – temple tank. Painted in Krita with my XP-Pen Artist 10s.

Temple tank

I thought of making this a monochrome painting1, but I like the subtle colours of this one. I am still not 100% satisfied with digitally painting landscapes and feel the need for a different technique. This one, I post-processed slightly in GIMP by adding the “cartoon” effect because the details felt a bit too muddy otherwise.

The biggest challenge in landscapes is not the detail or “likeness” to the reference image but how to subtract details from the source and get enough depth to stand out. A lot of the time, copying all the tiny details from the photographic reference can kill the depth and soul of the image.

  1. I did paint this monochrome initially and added a colour overlay layer afterwards [↩]
Portrait of late actor “Major” Sundarrajan

Portrait of late actor “Major” Sundarrajan

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A portrait of late Tamil actor “Major” Sundarrajan. Painted using Krita with my XP-Pen Artist 10S.

Late actor “Major” Sundarrajan

For those who are not aware, “Major” Sundarrajan was a distinctive actor in his time, holding his own again giants like MGR and Sivaji Ganesan with excellent character roles. The “Major” sobriquet is from his iconic role in the play, later adapted as a movie, Major Chandrakanth in which he played the titular role of a retired, blind major and shot into fame.

This is one of those portraits that I didn’t struggle with to get the likeness. Getting a likeness is still magic to me – it sometimes works almost effortlessly and at other times, I struggle and struggle till I give up and use a different reference image. I guess the trick is not relying on a single image but using multiple references, because a single photo doesn’t convey a person’s distinct personality. I chose to go with colour with this one, because it’s been a long time since I’ve painted a portrait in this style.