How to dragon your train, speedpaing with Krita and free wallpaper to download
How to dragon your train, the explanation
The other day on Mastodon, I came across the #HowToDragonYourTrain hashtag. It was obviously a pun with the animated movie "How To Train Your Dragon", and the goal was to draw a train and making it look like a dragon.
So, I drew a Ouigo!
Sketch and final illustration
The timelapse of this speedpainting with Krita
I love watching the illustrations timelapses from other artists, and since I tried the timelapse recorder of Krita, available since version 5, I try to do them more often.
From sketch to Android tablet
As usual, I started with a rough sketch on paper. I then shot a picture of it with my Android tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 from 2021, and I imported the picture in Krita. I traced the lineart over the the sketch (and you'll see in the video that I struggled a little bit), and then I pinned my reference photo of the train. I used this reference to be able to pick the closest blue and the closest pink from it. Then, I added colors, with masks for the secondary colors (the top of the head, or the bottom of the belly) so I would not be bothered with erasing if my brushes were too big for the little space to color.
Obviously, I had started the recording with the docker "Recorder", so every image was saved into a directory in the tablet.
From Android tablet to computer running GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 22.04
In order to create the video of the timelapse, the software ffmpeg is needed, and it is not available on Android. This is the reason why I can't create the videos directly on the tablet. No worry, I plugged the tablet to my computer, and "old" laptop from 2015 which has seen many operating systems (this is for another blog post). I copy the Krita file in .kra as well as the directory with all the screenshots made by Krita. Since my computer is running Ubuntu, I launched the app store (Discover, in this case) in order to find the adapted version of ffmpeg for my distro. This step must be done only once, it's just that my install of Ubuntu is rather fresh so I find from time to time that I have to install softwares. Once ffmpeg is install, you have to tell Krita where it is, and for me it is :
As a long time Windows user, where I usually know where to find freshly isntalled softwares, I didn't know where to look at first, but after a little search it went just fine ^^'
Then, I also point to krita where is my directory with all the previous screenshots for the timelapse. I also added text at this step, you'll see it in the video, so you can be assured it's really easy to start a timelapse on a device (the tablet) and finish it on another one (the computer). Then I clicked on "Export", chose the name of final file, and voilà!
The video is also available on my Youtube channel.
The video is in CC-BY-SA, and the music is "Paris Saint-Germain" by Jahzzar (en CC-BY-SA 3.0).
Oh, wait, I have a gift for you!
A free wallpaper to download, under CC-BY-SA licence
I was so happy of the result that I decided to make a wallpaper of it. It is actually the wallpaper of my main screen, a 24" monitor.
Clik to enlarge the picture. Licence CC-BY-SA
I made it available for free, and under a free licence, so if you want to support me on Ko-Fi ou LiberaPay, this would mean a lot, and would help me keep creating under free licences! 💙💜
Bonus : why a Ouigo ?
This is because of a scarf I knitted in 2015, where I mixed different colors that I liked, and they were the exact pink and the exact blue of the Ouigo... I didn't mean it, I didn't know their branding! 😅
The left picture was taken in a train station, in 2015.
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