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Krita Artist Session Recording Part II: Animtim's turn

Krita's training DVD producing hero, Animtim, shows in this video how he uses Krita to create a full character. He did this before, at LGM 2011, but the recording of his presentation there isn't up yet. Note how he handles layers by creating a group for them, the sketching with the sketch brush, inking with the sketch brush and creating a coloring layer. This sessions showed us that the sketch brush is way cool and that we have some work to do with the fill tools! Also, Animtim exposed a bug in the layer box that is now fixed, and some more inconveniences that Pentalis is working on. Pentalis and Silvio Heinrich (tomorrow's demoing artist!) committed their improvements to the preset editor yesterday.

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We're doing well with the fundraiser for the training dvd project -- but we haven't reached the goal yet (note the cool progressbar our webmaster and yesterday's showcasing artist Bugsbane added to the website) :

And the very cool Project NEON now has daily builds of Calligra for Ubuntu and friends: a few simple commands should be enough to get you the latest Krita to play with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:neon/ppa \
&& sudo apt-get update\
&& sudo apt-get install project-neon-base \
   project-neon-calligra \
   project-neon-calligra-dbg

If you paste that in a terminal, you should have a completely safe install of Calligra in /opt, ready to play with!

Krita Artist Session Recording Part I: Painting Bugs

Over the coming days, I'll post the recordings of the sessions we had with Krita artists Bugsbane, Animtim, Silvio Heinrich and David Revoy during the Krita sprint in Amsterdam. Each artists had about half an hour to show the developers and artists their way of working with Krita. And they had the freedom to complain about everything!

I'm splitting up the posts because the total viewing time is well over two hours. And also because of our ongoing DVD fundraiser, of course!

This is the first session. On the one hand, it's an instructional recording showing how to work with Krita in one particular way -- starting with the particle brush to create shapes, working with layers in different ways to build up the image. On the other hand, for us developers it was immensely valuable to see all the little roadblocks... Some of which have been fixed in the meantime!

So enjoy Bugsbane painting bugs!

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And don't forget our DVD fundraiser. Help Animtim create some great training material for artists everywhere!

Become part of Krita's first training DVD!

In 2010 and 2011, thanks to the generous donation of the community, Krita has grown into a mature digital painting application.

Krita is ready for widespread adoption by professional artists everywhere!

Krita adds an essential component to the suite of free applications for artists, a full-featured digital painting application, enabling artists who might haven't been able before to express their art with free tools to start using free software, making it possible for their talent and skills to engage with the free culture and free software world. So now that Krita has is ready to take its place among the other professional free graphics applications such as Scribus, Blender, MyPaint, Gimp or Inkscape, it's time to remove the last hurdles to widespread adoption by artists everywhere:

There isn't yet a real showcase piece that can inspire artists to give Krita (and free software) a serious try and...

Quality training material to get them up to speed.

Now we have the opportunity to work with experienced comic book artist Animtim to create a full 20 page color comic book and accompanying artist training DVD using Krita and the other free graphics tools.

Animtim's artwork is impressive, and in the DVD he'll share his experience with Krita as he shows artists everywhere, how to create a comic book, end to end. The DVD will highlight, step-by-step, how to prepare your page, sketch characters, ink with bitmap and vector tools, add color, and export to web or print all with Krita. Finally it will show how to create page layouts and a print-ready PDF with Scribus, making it useful for everyone wanting to create comics in print and on the web. Naturally the rest of us benefit by seeing more great comics, artists in free software and open culture!

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Download / View the HTML5 (webm) trailer

When the DVD and comic book is published, all the videos, brushes, artwork and other material will be released to artists everywhere with an open, creative commons license in time for the launch of Krita 2.4 (which will be available on Linux and Windows).

If we can get the support needed, that is!

Just like Lukas last year, we can't let Animtim starve -- he will need two months, maybe a bit longer, to work on this project full-time, so we need about two thousand euros of sponsorship to make this possible. Let's make it possible together!

Your donation will also help Krita and Scribus developers refine Krita's tools and workflow with the valuable feedback that only real-world, production use can give.

When the DVD becomes available for pre-order, you donation will give you a discount on the DVD + comic book package as well -- and your comic book will have a personal dedication from Animtim.

This is a daring venture for a small project like Krita, which is why we are asking you for your support for the production of the contents of the DVD. Once the contents have been created, Animtim will make sure they are updated for Krita 2.4, and the pre-order for the dvd's will start. Your donation will help us get beyond to this critical point!

Third Krita Sprint Day Three

It's Tuesday already, and I'm in full work mode again... But much happened on Sunday, and during the weekend several artists around the world made great pictures with Krita, so let's go and take a look at what happened.

A Krita sprint, like a Calligra sprint, usually drops down in intensity of discussions on the Sunday. That's the day we take what we discussed on Saturday and let all the bottled-up eagerness to start hacking free rein. And so it was this time. With the difference that Animtim, Deevad and Kubuntiac were around to give advice.

Pentalis took the task to assemble, collate and put into bugzilla all the suggestions made by the artists. By the end of the day quite a few were already implemented!

In the afternoon, David Revoy started to test the Krita CMYK workflow. He often prefers to create illustration work directly in CMYK because that way he can optimize ink coverage while working, instead of having to change his drawing afterwards because of non-optimal ink spreads.

Before the Krita sprint, David already wrote a long blog post about what was needed. After some problems with finding a way to add is favourite CMYK icc profile to krita's list of profile, everything went swimmingly.

A huge image was saved as 4-channel tiff and inspected in CMYKTool and Photoshop and inspected, and this time the result was perfect. Krita turns out to be suitable for this kind of highly professional work after all!

Finally we had to leave the Blender institute. Many thanks to Ton Roosendaal for making it possible for us to have our sprint there, many thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring travel and hotel and to Silvio Grosso for sponsoring so much Krita development!

And lets have a look at some of the other artwork posted on the Krita forums this week. Click on the links to learn more!:

A character design study by David Revoy:

Chikita in cartoon style by Ramon Miranda:

An work-in-progress exercise in coloring and blurring by Alexey

It's difficult to imagine how happy it makes us developers that we're seeing such great results from an application that we've worked on for so long -- for over ten years/.

And this

Is the artist of the Krita team caricatures:

Our Animtim!

Meet the Gang!

In between demoing his comic art and joining in the discussions during the meeting, an artist's hands are never idle! So Animtim prepared this little collection of Krita hackers and artists... Only he himself is missing! So meet the gang, rendered by the Sketch brush!

Adam Celarek