Friday, December 7, 2018

Exotics in pen and ink ... and more Amberlight

(click to see this at 800x1000)
Playing happily in Krita, learning its interface with a (digital) pen and ink project. This is actually an old, old work which -- back in the day, something like 2010 -- couldn't even be raytraced, because my then-computer used to crash to the desktop if I asked it to do that! So this old piece was only ever done with the deep shadow map, but I always liked it a lot for its dynamism.

So... I thought, "If I'm ever going to learn the Krita interface, PAINT something. Paint what? Of course, you immediately go blank. Then it occurred to me to look back through my old, old, old portfolio and pick something that a great character design, good pose, not-so-good render. Work with that...


I have a LOT to learn, but I think I'm starting to get there. The truth is, I can only learn anything hands-on. I just start the thing up and ... doodle in color! With this project, I've basically doodled in color on top of a sketch derived from the low-quality old render. Not bad, and we'll get getter as we go. Also ...



...same sort of thing. Using this to learn the Krita interface. Today I haven't done one thing in Krita that you couldn't do in Photoshop (and I have done it many times), but leaning the new interface is a Very Big Thing, especially for this brain of mine! Krita is enormously complex, and just having the PDF manual, and/or the user wiki, open on the other computer, barely helps me, due to the way my brain works. It learns by doing, and almost refuses to learn any other way. *Sigh*

Let me finish out for today with a couple more Amberlight images:



More soon ... I have a project in mind that is dying to be painted. Exotic fellas and horses. It's in my mind, I just have to make it come out...