Interview with Omiya Tou

Could you tell us something about yourself?

I'm a self-taught Sunday digital painter from Tokyo, Japan. I publish my artworks under my alias Omiya Tou. Sometimes I'm also a FLOSS tester or translator and lately I've committed translations for G'MIC.

Do you paint professionally, as a hobby artist, or both?

Currently I paint completely as a hobby for fun and stress-relief.

What genre(s) do you work in?

I usually do 2D drawings/paintings of manga-styled portraits.

Whose work inspires you most -- who are your role models as an artist?

When I create my artwork I always try to convey the tranquility and warmth of Nihon-ga works such as those by Kaii Higashiyama. Also I have been very much impressed by Yoko Tanji's versatility in styles.

How and when did you get to try digital painting for the first time?

In 2002, when I was 14, I did what can be called digital painting for the first time.  I think it was a Final Fantasy fanart. In the initial few years I had created my artworks by digitizing pencil linearts with a scanner shared in the school that I was in, taking back the data to my house with floppy discs and coloring them with a mouse and a freeware painting app named Pixia on a Windows XP laptop.

What makes you choose digital over traditional painting?

It would be that digital media are less time- and space-consuming, easier to revise and enable me to focus on the pure joy of painting, leaving every boring task to the computer.

How did you find out about Krita?

I did when I was trying out painting apps available in Ubuntu to which I migrated from Windows to run GIMP at its full speed.

What was your first impression?

When I tried Krita for the first time it was still a sort of tech demo and unsuitable for daily use, but I felt it was worth keeping track of -- and actually I've been excited seeing how much it has improved since then.

What do you love about Krita?

There are quite a lot of things, but I especially love the quick pop-up palette, numerous drawing assistants, well-tuned preset brushes, and the hyper-energetic dev team. :)

What do you think needs improvement in Krita? Is there anything that really annoys you?

For me Krita is just awesome lately, but if I must say something I think it will be nice if the color curves dialog window is resizeable and the measure tool remains visible when another tool is active.

What sets Krita apart from the other tools that you use?

Canvas tilting/flipping, GPU acceleration and CMYK capability.

If you had to pick one favourite of all your work done in Krita so far, what would it be, and why?

I'd pick this because I like the sense of depth and atmosphere:

What techniques and brushes did you use in it?

I colored this by overlaying a solid blue-gray layer which is set to color dodge mode onto a grayscale image. A lot of this is painted using a brush named Bristles_hairy, definitely one of my favorites.

Where can people see more of your work?

I cross-post my works onto deviantART, Tumblr and Flickr.

Anything else you'd like to share?

On my Flickr page I post my artworks under a CC-BY license in their full resolution, so please feel free to use them. Thank you!