I painted this landscape in Krita, and threw some acapella Bob Ross music on it for emphasis. Hope you like it!
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First off! I’ll be teaching Blender at LinuxFest Northwest again, so I hope to see you there!
Second off! One of the organizers at LinuxFest approached me about Krita, wondering if I knew anyone who would be willing to teach it. I’d never heard of it, but foolishly threw my name into the ring and started picking up the program. Krita is a free, open source drawing tool whose biggest feature is certainly its brush interface.
The bad news: just like GIMP, Krita’s still young, only 6 years old. It still has that rough-around-the-edges, slightly underfunded and undermanaged feel that GIMP has. I found myself looking up features that don’t exist yet, or exist but are turned off due to bugs. Navigating the UI can be painful and buggy from time to times, and you can still get the occasional crash doing mundane things like undoing.
The good news: Krita’s brush interface is wonderful. Right Click is an ever-present palette for both your favorite brushes and the currently active color. Additionally, you can use an image as your color palette. It has several great features that Photoshop still lacks, despite its enraging $500 price tag:
- Mirrored drawing!
- Hold shift for easy brush resizing!
- Erase as a layer mode transfer!
The biggest difference is hard to explain, as it’s technical in nature. In Photoshop, Brushes are limited in their function. They can slice, dice, and manipulate an image/3d-based brush, but only to an extent. Krita gives advanced pattern control, animated color variation, and (best of all) stroke bleeding. I first tried this interface technique via Mr. Doob, but this takes it out of HTML 5 and puts it into a true image editor.
In conclusion, I’m delighted with Krita, and intend to use it for many future projects. It offers something refreshing and exciting while GIMP feels like it hasn’t advanced in 5 years. Furthermore, Photoshop CS6, sadly, won’t be adding this level of brush functionality. So instead of spending $200 on your next Photoshop, consider donating to Krita’s development.
Zoinks! After two weeks in Vancouver, I’m back in the states. Man, I had a blast. I worked on a project with UBC Fisheries (more to come later), followed by the Vancouver Game Jam.
I ended up on a team with James and Scott, and we made an awesome lil Unity game in 48 hours. One sleep break Friday night, followed by marathon production!
Hence, today I am taking it easy. But I still felt so jazzed about fast production that I felt like making some more stuff. So here’s storyboards for an old pitch of mine, which I pumped out in about 2 hours this morning. Stay tuned for more content from my adventures in Vancouver!
Chaka Khan…plus a conch shell.
heads
In a talk with the wizardly Tony Mullen at the December Seabug, he quipped that all drawing teachers ever say is “draw looser.” I was drawing this rather nobbly antelope off of arkive.org and felt pretty stiff. So I kept drawing until it felt loose enough. Indeed, I’d say the second-to-last one ended up the best.
My cat Charlie.
I’ve been playing with watercolor pencils on occasion.
Nekkidness.
Drew a guy, then tried to stay on the single subject.
Character studies from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland
I looked around on the internet for a fashion generator, with humorous results. Pity I can’t recall the URL.
More Disney studies, from the excellent http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/
In homage to the inimitable J.C. Leyendecker, I made a Baby New Year illustration for our tumultuous 2012. The bad news is I put this off til the last day of 2011, but the good news is I’m getting faster! This took about an hour of doodling and compositing my doodles together, plus five hours of painting.
Here’s to a great 2012!
Hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday season this year! Here’s my Christmas card, which warped into more of a comic strip than a card.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Yaaay! Finished this sketchbook in under 2 months, without resorting to unpolished unscannable gesture-binging.
Some credit for this completion deadline goes to Star Trek. I successfully watched Star Trek TNG in entirety over the last month or so, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a show so good for multitask drawing.
Sketched a lot of lifeforms from photos this time around. I was going to http://www.arkive.org/random-species over and over again. Although I grumbled about it, I tried to draw the plants, coral reefs, fish and birds it threw at me over and over. In other words, the boring stuff. In retrospect, birds, fish and fish are more interesting than I thought. But mostly, plants are stupid.
I dunno if it’s “correct”, but I like rendering fur in a specific way. Scribbling back and forth for fur doesn’t look right, because you don’t get wispy points with the fur. Similarly, repeated lines don’t look as good, because it’s hard to get a concise sense of border.
The hybrid is drawing a series of “U” strokes, where the start and end of the U create a wispy, feathery edge for fur and feathes. However, the inner border (the U bend) feels thick and materialized.
Lizards are one of my favorite things to draw. Their legs don’t fold in a hinge motion. Instead they prop up on their legs and rotate to move them. As a result, their legs bulge with muscle in all the funnest places. Also, their feet (which don’t function like springs ala mammals) have toes that point in slouchy rest poses. If a claw isn’t digging into tree bark, it lays sideways on the nail. It makes them looks a little disheveled and unplanted.
Uploaded in reverse; sketches at the top are the most recent.
Lots of animals and such. I think I was feeling self-conscious about my habit of heads, so there’s a fair amount more “whole body” anatomical sketches.
