2020 was the first time in a very long time I’d put serious study into my art
since college. I have three main resources I used during that pandemic time:
Hopefully once May 2022 rolls around I’ll be even better and faster.
Krita 4.4.3 was released recently, and the Android version
fixed the biggest show-stopper for me to be able to use it: customizations to
the app configuration are now restored on startup, so you can rearrange and
modify settings and they are preserved between app uses.
This means I was able to set up Krita so I could minimize the time needed to
go into the main menu, and not need to use my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+’s keyboard,
while supporting a workflow similar to the one I came up with for
Clip Studio Paint:
- The addition of Clear and Deselect to the top bar lets me use
Lasso Select for manipulation and erasing much faster.
- Adding Show Dockers lets me hide most of the UI without having to go
into full-blown Full Screen mode.
- I added Mirror View to the toolbar as well so I can quickly flip the canvas
to check my drawings for errors.
- I moved Tool Options to the navigation and out of a docker since I
don’t use it too often. Mainly for Reference Art.
- I moved the Toolbox docker to the top of the screen so all the tools
are laid out in a row. Having them in the side docker meant I had to scroll
up and down a bunch in the docker to find things.
- Everything else on the screen covers my usual CSP workflow.
There are a few things that are missing
- I want to be able to lock transforms to aspect ratio as a tool option to
Transform. Without a keyboard, it’s not locked at all so you have to
be precise when manipulating selections.
- There’s no right-click support on the canvas at all, even with a keyboard
or with a Bluetooth mouse, so vector operations are more difficult.
I went back to drawing balloons by hand like I did in the
Autodesk Sketchbook days of
The Industrious Rabbit.
- More robust balloon handling in general would be great. I don’t care
as much abuot text handling on Android since dealing with fonts is
a total mess.
- I don’t seem to be able to save tags on brushes to be able to group them.
I’ll have to experiment with this more.
I plan on doing all the art for the next The Industrious Rabbit post in
Krita to give it a real good workout. So far, so good!
I had started down the road of redoing the covers of the games
I featured in my recent The Industrious Rabbit post about
Nintendo Entertainment System Memory Management Controllers,
The NES: Cartridge Constraints,
but decided to switch instead to the memory magician acting out the game using balloon props instead.
I did manage to finish one that came out pretty great, and it’s a rework
of the cover of the game Arkista’s Ring. Enjoy!
These are some characters built for a Root RPG campaign that I’ve been
running for quite a while. I’m sure that I’ve referred to their existence while
playing actual board games of Root. This post is for the
Root Fan Art
contest, and this is just a small sample of the art I’ve built over the past year.
These pieces just happen to be the best. Hashtag RootFanArt. Enjoy!
I’ve been doing some blog posts on
The Industrious Rabbit
on how older computers
manage their memory, and with some of the research I’ve been doing into the
NES and the Amiga, I’ve wanted to mess around with a fantasy console platform.
I decided to get into messing with TIC-80.
I had wanted to experiment with
PICO-8,
but I also wanted Android export and wanted to support an open source
project as well.
I decided for my first project to try a few things:
- Import an image
- Do scanline palette changing
- Write an audio track
- Do a stupid text thing
Here’s some things I learned:
- Image importing is
.gif only. The colors in the image when you import
them will match the built in game’s palette as best as possible.
Which means that, if you have a 4 color GIF, color 0 in the GIF may not become
color 0 in the imported sprite.
- In the music editor, the tracks are the individual tunes,
the rows dictate the length of each frame in the track, and a frame is a
collection of notes, kind of like a group of measures.
- You’ll need to put rests inbetween notes to get notes to turn on and off.
