Howdy folks! Here’s a quick(ish) walthrough of how the Krita Comics Templates are setup. They’re really simple, but it’s good to understand how things are setup. And, even if you don’t use them directly, you might get some ideas you can use on your own Krita documents.
Here’s a quick sketch I did of … dunno … she looks like she could be the killer “dame” in a Vault of Horror comic book. This sketch was done to test out Ramon Miranda’s Real Pencil Bundle Sketch.
You can get version 1 of his brushes from this forum post on Krita Artists.
There are two categories of brushes in the bundle (as well as two bundles, one supporting tablets with tilt, one without). I’ll have more to say about them once I experiment with them.
Take a look at the thread in that link. It has some incredible drawings, including one I really liked that uses these brushes as color pencils.
Here’s the final sketch.
Happy drawing!
Digital sketch using Krita of a nice(?) bog monster.
You know how you sometimes need to find what layer some piece of your art is on and you try to figure it out by looking at the tiny icons on the layers panel or toggling their visibility one by one? Stop doing that! In this video I show you a quick shortcut built right into Clip Studio Paint that lets you do just that. Head on over to my YouTube Channel and Hit Subscribe!
These are sketches and doodles I create daily. If you want to see more finished works, please visit my portfolio page. Scroll down for the latest posts.
Will Eisner’s The Spirit – 11/05/2021
Jack and Owl – Ink on Moleskine
Ratty’s Halloween Home – Digital
Witch’s Hat – Pencil on Toned Paper
Angel or Devil – Pencil on Bristol
Bit of a streak of pinup monster girls – This one is bride of Frankenstein – pencil on toned paper.
Velma and the Great Pumpkin – I’m mixing up my halloween/fall cartoons – Pencil on Toned Paper
A nice vampire for October 1st – Pencil on Bristol
A quick sketch using a custom brush tip I made with Clip Studio after following the tutorial by Scott Drummon
Princess Leia watercolor
Wizard – This was in response to this tweet that suggested using photos of orchestra conductors when you needed references for painting or drawing a wizard.
Christopher Reeves is my favorite superman. Here he is for #supermanday
He Man is coming back! Loved that show.
Vampire Pirate Ladies :3
Lady Dimitrescu
Red Archer
Little Grogu/Baby Yodder
Video of my painting process for my latest instagram profile picture.
Another copy of a character from the board game Small World.
January 22, 2021 – Clipstudio Paint – 30 minutes
I had a daydream about a little bard who wandered from village to village plying his trade so I set it down with traditional watercolors. Enjoy!
Here’s a progress shot I managed to take:
Some small details:
I finished reading The Frog Princess to my daughter and I made this little illustration inspired by it. But this time, I tried to develop a completely different style than I usually use.
Every few months I like to mix up my style and try something new. This helps me get out of any rut I’m in, but it also helps me understand my current (and usual) style and see it from a different perspective. I get to solve the same problem in a different way. Sometimes I bring back the new techniques into my usual style, or sometimes I continue to use the new style for the long-term.
Krita comes with a set of built-in color pencil brushes. I wanted to see how well I could replicate physical color pencils. The image below is an example of what I did over a few hours:
By comparison, here is a piece I did in actual color pencils on toned pencil.
So, immediately, I can see that the texture of the paper is missing. I tried to add this using some watercolor random textures but didn’t quite get it. Pencil line is also not quite as chunky and textury as I’d like. The lines in the digital version are still too smooth. This may be because I drew with a very thin pen at 350dpi. It was also difficult to get a good fill with the digital brush. The available fill brush gave too smooth a pattern, making it look smudgy rather than textury (is that a term?).
Overall, though, I’m pretty happy. I will try different themes and see how well I develop.
I did modify the standard sketch color pencil so that the tip would be smaller based on pressure because I felt that the default curve left too thick a line. And, I also tried out David Revoy’s Extra Brush Presets for Krita 4
On a whim, I decided to try out Krita, a free (as in freedom) painting program. I had tried it out briefly a while back, maybe a year or two ago, and found it fine, but I didn’t really get into it for some reason. So, I kept working with Clipstudio Paint.
Today, I gave Krita another try and this is the result:
I was really inspired by the paintings in the interview with Albert Weand on the Krita blog. Check out the paintings; they are beautiful and showed me the kind of artwork one can make with Krita.
The interface should be fairly familiar if you’re an illustrator used to working with ClipStudio Paint and Photoshop. I love the watercolor brushes and used them nearly out of the box with no modifications. Most exciting to me is the thoughtful experimental features that the community is working on.
One example is the blended color picker feature. Here is a quick example:
Essentially, the color picker will pick a blend between your current selected color and the color under the tool. You can tweak the blend amount so that you can get more or less of the target color.
Check out Emmet O’Neill’s YouTube Video (no longer available =( ) giving a very thorough and better demonstration of the feature. He is one of the developers of this feature.
Another example is the simple shade selector which gives you a set of choices of possible shading options around the currently selected color.
The sphere on the left is shaded by simply moving around the color palette. The sphere on the right is shaded using options from the shade selector. I put arrows so you can see where I selected the colors for the parts of the sphere.
I haven’t been able to find thorough documentation on the idea behind it but, from experimentation and some old blog posts I see it as a way to keep your currently selected color available while presenting possible shading options based on human perception along differnt gradients. (Colour Selectors Once More, HSI and HSY for Krita’s advanced colour selector. )
One of the first things I did when I started painting digitally was use the select darker and lighter colors along the color selector, but this quickly leads to muddy looking paintings.
Eventually, you learn that you need to change to a different color range and select different hues and values for the shaded area and for the highlight area. Then you have to make sure you come back to the base color so you navigate correctly around the color space.
With Krita’s simple shade selector you are, instead, provided with some good shade choices without having to hunt around the color wheel or the color space. And, then when you choose one of those shade colors, the original color stays available in the middle of the gradient. It doesn’t always provide an appropriate choice; for example, you might need to take into account the color of the light or the bounce light in the shade.
Later this month I’ll try to make a line-art comic and see how its inking, line smoothness, and detail compares to Clip Studio. Follow me on twitter to find out when I publish another post.
Thanks for stopping by!
Have a look around and get in touch with me over on twitter.
Here’s a peek at my studio.
