Water in Nature - a MyPaint + GIMP tutorial

This tutorial aims to create the following image (I call it "Tranquility"):



This tutorial is a little different from my other painting tutorials (list is [here]) in that it is using not only GIMP but the free open-source painting program [MyPaint] for much of the painting process. So this will be a mini-tutorial for using MyPaint as well.

This is not a very difficult tutorial technically, the difficulties lie in the artistic work itself, not in juggling program controls or using "tricks" to get results. It is however highly recommended for you to use a gfx tablet for this, since MyPaint is designed to be used with one. With a mouse the tutorial is still doable, but it becomes a lot harder and probably not as satisfying. Nevertheless the technique for creating water is useful to know all in itself.

No previous MyPaint knowledge is required. For GIMP parts it is assumed you have a decent understanding of the program. The [Beginning GIMP] and [Setting up GIMP for artistic work] tutorials might help you there, but any basic GIMP tutorials should do.


MyPaint introduction

MyPaint is a free open-source paint program. It is intended as a pure painting program and to be used together with GIMP since it has no photomanipulation or post-processing functions at all. MyPaint is meant to be used with a graphics tablet and you cannot get the full power of the program and its brushes without it.

This tutorial was done at a time when Windows users where still stuck with the 0.5 version and the more advanced features of later versions where thus still only available to Linux users. So in order to allow everyone to follow, it is not using any layers, backgrounds or similar features seen MyPaint 0.6 and later.

I have made a short review of MyPaint with plenty of images [here]. The program's official homepage is [here].


Working in MyPaint



The MyPaint interface is minimalistic. You are not supposed to have any windows or tool options visible on screen more than necessary. The suggested work flow is to have one hand on your pen and the other one on the keyboard to do all operations. Pressing the correct keyboard key will temporarily bring up the selector you want, it then should go away as you continue to work. A brief explanation of this idea can be found in the [MyPaint official tutorial].

All keyboard shortcuts are easily changed: Just highlight the entry in the menu and press the new key combination you want (just like GIMP's dynamic shortcut feature). Left mouse button paints. The Middle mouse button pans the canvas.

Some common keyboard shortcuts you need to know to work with MyPaint (not listing ones only available in version 0.6):

• F and D: Change the size of your current brush.
• G: Standard GTK Colour selector (click again to close).
• V : Pop-up colour selector (click again for second type, anywhere else to close). This is used to quickly select a colour close to your current one.
• B: Brush selector window. This is the core of MyPaint. All "tools" are implemented as different procedural brushes and with these a wide range of effects can be achieved. We will not go into modifying any of the default brushes in this tutorial, but the options to do so are nearly endless.
• R: Select the colour currently under the cursor (in 0.6, Ctrl-click can also be used).
• + and -: Zoom in and out. MyPaint has an unlimited canvas. In the 0.5 version zooming out too far will make the program slower though, so be careful.
• Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y: Undo / Redo. In 0.5 you have roughly 3 quick undos, after which the undo function becomes quite slow (it literally redraws every stroke you did). Version 0.6 gives you some 20 quick undo levels.
• F11: Full-screen mode. You will want to use this as much as possible.
• Ctrl+S: Save your image. For the sake of this tutorial, save your work as an PNG image, this GIMP can also read. Save often.

Tutorial


Open MyPaint and go to full-screen mode (F11) so you have the canvas filling your entire screen. MyPaint uses an infinite canvas, there are no edges. Avoid zooming or panning around for now. We will work in the area we see in our window.


Press B to bring up the brush list. Select the "Bulk" brush. This is a thick, opaque brush, good for laying down solid colour. Press G to get the colour selector and make sure you have black selected.



Fill the surface of your canvas with black using the "bulk" brush. Fill out to the edges, but don't worry that you cannot create a perfect "square" surface, we will much later use GIMP to even things out.

Users of MyPaint 0.6 can select the menu Layers->Background and choose a black canvas instead.





Press B to select the Blend+Paint brush. Don't worry if your brush list aren't ordered the same as mine; you can easily change order of the brushes as you like just by dragging them around.

Use G to get the colour selector and choose an ochra colour. Lay down a rough patchwork of lines over the image. You are not aiming to cover things up, we want to lay a foundation, especially in the lower part of the image. The Blend+Paint brush is a very useful brush that combines a blur with a paintbrush in one. Press hard to paint and when you press less you will instead blur your lines (The Smudge+ brush works the same way but with smudge instead of blur, you might want to experiment with that one as well .)



Our idea is to portray water separated by a few groups of trees. Calm water is however reflecting the sky, so we'd better start with that. Pick a bright blue and paint in the sky. You can use a large paint+blur brush for this. As you see there is no worrying about being detailed at this point -- just scribble away!



Lay out splotches of green in the center and towards the edges. Also make sure you let the green stretch down from the actual trees -- this is their reflection in the water. Also pick a more faint green for the distant green shapes we see through the trees. They also reflect in the water. Remember to not paint things too thickly. Water is reflective and full of unexpected colours. By letting parts of the various colours shine through (by pressing down lightly) you get some of this for free.



You now need to subtly smear the blue of the sky out into the green reflections to make the surface of the water. The Paint+Blend brush is excellent for for this since it does not create any hard edges. There is still no need to be too detailed yet.
Step away from your monitor now and then to see the effect from a distance.

The trees are not just blobs of green. Sky shines through them. So pick the sky colour (R key) and dot in some "holes" in the trees. This is a tricky art and you will probably have to change these later.



MyPaint helps us with making the trees more realistic. This is the brush you are looking for. It doesn't look it, but its effects do well to mimic leaves.



The further away the leaves are, the paler they will look against the sky. The paler, the more distant is the effect. So trace the outline of the trees with a pale green and gradually move closer by changing the colour to a darker green. In parts where you imagine light shines through, you can place some brighter "leaves". Note that we have not actually started forming the tree itself, we are just playing with shadows so far.



Pick a dark green and start establishing a darker "core" of the trees. Let this darkness reflect into the water below.



Use the Paint+blur brush to smooth the water now, be careful to retain the shades of dark and light you have so painstakingly added, but make all transitions smooth. This takes some work, so be patient. Darken the water a bit more if you think it is needed.



It is time to give the trees more love, by adding proper branches and trunks to them. Do this with dark green and brown. You can play around with which brushes are best suited for this, you want one which tapers off with pressure. Build the tree so that the branches here and there disappear into the greenery. You want to give the impression of 3D -- this is supposed to be a large mass of branches and leaves sprouting in all directions.
Make sure to use our leaf-brush for all vegetation -- nature is full of shapes and you don't want to smudge or blur away any detail. Vary the green a lot.



As said, nature is full of structure and colour you don't expect. Add spots of "off" colour to your tree. Most of this colour will not be obvious in the final image, but in small quantities colours like this gives more life to the vegetation rather than just sticking with pure shades of green.



Make sure you extend the branches with thin lines and details. The drawback of the leaf brush is that it consists of separated dots. You want to go through this and "connect" these leaves so that they don't float freely in the air. Don't be afraid to make complex shapes, trees are complex things.



Now add bright spots to the water using the Paint+Blur brush, to reflect where you think the light from the sky would shine through the leaves and show in the water mirror. Here you can see that working with the leaf brush has hid away much of the "off" colours we added, only a few hints remain.



Extend your tree-work to the other trees, adding branches and build leaves. On the left above you see an example of a branch extending out over the water, with some highlights on it.



Using a small Paint+Blur brush you can add highlights to the water, as well as faint structures on the distant mountains.

We are reaching the end of what we can do in MyPaint. It is time to move over to GIMP to finalize the image. Save the image (Ctrl+S) as an PNG.

UPDATE Jan 2010: GIMP can now also load MyPaint's native file format, ORA (Open Raster), using a plugin created by the MyPaint devs. Using ORA has the advantage over PNG of retaining eventual layers (layers are available in recent versions of Mypaint). To make GIMP load and save .ora files, install the ora plugin in your GIMP plugin folder. The plugin requires python.


GIMP

Now open GIMP and load your PNG image. You can close MyPaint now.



We are now in GIMP, and have loaded our mypaint image. Use File->Save as and save the image as an XCF image, so you can save your GIMP work with layers and all.



Use the crop tool and cut the image into a nice rectangle, cutting away the excess colour.



I feel the colours of the image are a bit cold. Select Colors->Curves... and raise the curve of the red channel a bit to give the image a warmer feel.



We will try to make this into a more nightly scene. Copy the image layer and set the copied layer to mode "Multiply" with an opacity at 70%. As you can see, our colours suddenly became much more intense and contrasting against the sky.



Adding the moody light in the trees (the sun shinging though? A mysterious light among the trees?). This is done with a large fuzzy brush and the airbrush tool. Make a faint halo of yellow and fill in the center with white. Don't forget the reflection in the water! In GIMP it's easiest to work with the smudge tool with a low opacity to smudge the light into the water properly.



We will make the edges of the image a little darker. Make a rectangular selection along the top of the image. Make sure you are on your Copied layer (mode Multiply), then select the Gradient tool with a dark blue and a FG->Transparent gradient. Make the gradient vertically across the selection and you will see the sky darkening.

Repeat this along all the edges to make them darker and focus the attention to the center of the image.



We are done! The final image can be seen on GimpTalk [here] and on DeviantArt [here].


Summary

MyPaint implements a different workflow than GIMP, focusing more on painting. Its major advantage lies in prototyping images -- starting to doodle things and see where it goes. Together with GIMP it is very powerful and worth playing around with and learn. It should however remembered that this is only how I work; there are as many ways to do an image as there are paintings. You could for example envision switching between MyPaint and GIMP several times, adjusting the image in steps before continuing to paint.

Hope you learned something from this tutorial and that you dare to try this out, it is not so hard as it looks from the length.
If so, post your results!
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Griatch


Results from the thread (Hall of fame)

Kal:


gdodinet:


alexiadeath:

I often have trouble with creating realistic trees and other plants...prehaps i should look into getting mypaint.

I started on this last night. It's interesting, but tough.

Just curious, why do you start with a black background if you just plan to cover up the whole thing with blue and ochre?

Eric

Even though you won't see any of the "canvas" in the end, this will alter the choices you do when laying down the base colours of your piece. For example, if you plan on a bright image like this, I generally want to avoid letting the white canvas shine through -- having the background black puts the whole control over the bright spots in your hands.
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Griatch

Okay, that makes sense.

Thanks for this tutorial. I use windows with the earlier version (I wouldn't call myself "computer savvy" to the extent necessary to get the newer version), and I don't have that brush you go leafy with, and I'm not sure which is my blend+paint brush. I saw a site that had brushes for download, but I wasn't really sure how to make them available in the program--I only have lots of GIMP brushes because you gave step-by-step instructions in a tutorial. so I'm still a bit lost on this one, but hope to try it soon.

@JohannasGarden

I will try to put up the brushes for download, it is possible they are not availble pre-0.6. It's really simple to add them, just drop the files in mypaint's brushes folder.
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Griatch

I uploaded a small zip-file with the brushes needed. You can download them here: http://www.mediafire.com/?kwuytsdsy2c Unzip it and you will find a folder with six files. Just find your mypaint program folder on your harddrive and locate the folder inside named "brushes". Drop the six files in there and you will have the brushes available to use!


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Griatch

awesome tut about halfway through it now 5/5

@oI KrYpToNiC Io

Sounds good! Looking forward to your result.
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Griatch

Very beautiful work and helpful tutorial! I like using both Gimp and Mypaint... I only wish the two programs joined together though! Maybe some day...

Nice... I'll try this...

Thanks for the great tutorial! I just discovered MyPaint this week and found the link to your tutorial on their resources page. I thought I'd follow along for my first attempt and post my painting here.

Thanks again

Hi Kal and welcome to GIMPtalk!

What a good result you have here! I like the amount of detail one can see in the branches and leaves; also the off-coloured flowers work well here. It's a quite well-groomed forest this.
The only real critique is the water which could do well with more sky-brightness in it (especially since the sun is visible, the water will look almost white almost all over except closest to us where it becomes very dark, almost black).

This is a cool result though, thanks for trying the tutorial and posting! I'm putting it up in the hall of fame at the top.
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Griatch

Hi Griatch,

Just created an account on GimpTalk to say thanks. I wanted to try "color painting" (i usually start with a sketch, not with blobs of color) and found MyPaint and your tutorial yesterday. I gave it a try and i kinda like MyPaint, although the layering system is still not mature enough (i ended up working with a single layer).

Here's the result of my attempt to follow your tutorial. It's not quite satisfying: red-ish leaves are too marked, tree shadows/reflection is not realistic enough, the yellow stuff seems weird, side trees do seem blob-ish, etc. but i'll just need to try and work more. Thanks for this nice tutorial.

Great tutorial Griatch. I never could get the hang of painting like that.
Those are some fantastic outcomes guys. They really are looking great.

@cyrilshark

Thanks. Yes, it's fun that people produce so nice results with this.

@gdodinet
A lovely result there! I like that you went with a different colour palette and whereas you say the leaves are too red I don't really agree; they spice up the painting a lot, gives it life. You also made a good job with the water as well as the structure of the tree's trunk in the center. Well done.

A critique is the direction of light. I see you have sort of aimed for a similar low-sun that I used in the tutorial - but painting the sun face-on put certain requirements on the scene; notably that things will be very dark when you see them against a setting sun; this is the reason my original is so dark. Your image on the other hand seems (beautifully) lit from behind us, probably a morning sun due to the soft yellow colours. I would thus suggest you remove the hint of light coming between the branches (and their reflection in the water) and just let the sun remain behind us, that way the lighting will work without any further changes (even the islands in the distance are consistenly lit face-on after all).
You might also want to make the falling leaves a bit lighter, they stand out a bit too much at the moment, they will not dramatically change colour when they fall from the tree after all, so just use similar brightness and shades as the tree above has. Just some ideas for future works.

I really enjoy the light and colour of this and I'm happy my tutorial helped. I put it up in the hall of fame. Hope to see you more around GimpTalk and not just for this one post!
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Griatch

Well, I failed both trees and water, but it turned out quite nice anyway. Any pointers about what can be done to improve matters welcome.

Mypaint has its pros and its cons. One of the major cons is that working at any other zoom level than 1:1 is highly inconvenient.

Hi Griatch,

Thanks for your critics. It's true that i don't thiink a lot before putting light or color (however i sometimes stop and just stare at what i have so far, hoping ideas will just pop up - and it works most of the time). Actually necroskop, on mypaint forum, gave me a similar advice about light and general contrast - concerning another drawing i posted on the forum there, and i think those could apply for this water-tree as well : thinking about it, there's also an obvious lack of contrast (i don't know but perhaps that's why i put the leaves as it).

Concerning Gimp, i almost don't use it anymore since i discovered mypaint. The workflow in MyPaint, the brushes as well, seems so much natural to use. So i'm not sure i will come often to GimpTalk, but who knows? Anyway thanks a lot for your advices.

Alexia,

I like your interpretation. Granted the water looks more fogg-ish (or was it smok-ish?) but as you said it turned out nicely, and you conveyed a peaceful mood. I also like the fantasy style you set up.

Why is that? For me, it works just exactly the same as GIMP (ctrl+scrollwheel, middleclick->drag etc), with the added facility of being able to scroll quickly with arrow keys and zooming centered on the cursor.*
Is there some special behaviour that only works the way you like in 1:1?

* I'm using (pre-)0.80 aka git HEAD, which notably has "faster zoomed-out view (30x speedup in some cases)" and also optimizes some needlessly cpu-intensive brushes.

General painting behviour mostly. Brushes suck at larger sizes, reseting back to default size on change that is too small for zoomouts etc.


Me too.

Great colours there, alexiadeath! Feels really dreamy and "fantasy"-like. The coloration of water under those light conditions is a rather tricky issue actually; but I would imagine more of the sky colour should probably be visible in the water, up until a point rather close to us as the angle against the water surface becomes sharp enough to allow seeing deeper into the water. You might also want to check the water level to the left and right of the tree-trunk; there seems to be a discontinuity there ...
The style here actually sort of matches the "flying carpet" character you made for my character sketch tutorial; this could come out of some arabian painting I think.

As for the use of Zoom in MyPaint, I can't say I agree. For this image I used the maximum zoom-out of MyPaint, which results in a massive 10000x5000 resolution. True, using that with many layers is a drag, but that resolution takes its toll also on GIMP (although GIMP is still clearly faster, this is true). That was a bit extreme, but MyPaint was certainly fully usable all the time. Most work I do in 3-4 zoom-out steps in MyPaint. I've never had any issues with brushes resetting either, that sounds like something you should put down as a bug to MyPaint.
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Griatch

Thanks for the nice tutorial Griatch. I have been using gimp for some time now( I now have 2.6. and just started using MyPaint 0.8.0. I followed this tutorial and came up with an alright painting, but couldn't find the "leaf" brush you used; the mediafire link u gave leads to a page that says, "Invalid or deleted file" so i couldn't download the brushes. The painting I came up with is alright for a beginner, but I could describe it as "hazy and indistinct," compared to yours. If I could figure out how to post it, maybe u could give me some pointers for how to improve it. Thanks again.

@reelzfire

I have removed the link to the brushes, noone should be using MyPaint 0.5 anymore, so these brushes are part of MyPaint now. In version 0.8, you find them both in the "classic" brush category. There are many brushes which are similar in style to these I mention as well.
To post your image, easiest is to upload it to an image host, e.g. imagehost.org and then copy&paste the link you get here.
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Griatch

Hi, Griatch, I think I got the link correct above. Thanks for the info. I welcome any critiques.