Got around using Memileo Impasto Brushes as designed, and while I didn’t manage to use them without relapsing into my usual aching-shoulders-and-a-thousand-brushstrokes painting style I’m still fine with the result.
That bundle is great! I’ve been using them for gentle blending, foliage, even textured hair. They’re so good for natural hair!
Nice! I try to leave brushwork for the very end of the because I tend to fragment shading without trying. Excluding the background, the impasto brushes were the last brushes used, and sparingly, just to blend a few things here and there. Mixing it with a base done with the rake one worked really well to impart a bit of movement without losing control of the brushwork.
I’ve got better quality demo that isn’t lagging showing how I’ve been using the painterly brushes!
I’m also using the airbrush a lot added to the simple round ones to define shapes and light before fluffing it up. I meant to include an example here but forgot. I swear don’t paint only by tiny selections.
Oh, and for everyone interested on the freehand selection, let me campaign for adding stabilizer support to it. *wiggles eyebrows* Stabilizer on Freehand Selection Tool
How did you get the small window at the side, is it a new type of overview Docker? I really like your UI layout, so I think I’ll rearrange mine to more like yours. Very clean and spacious.
That’s a detached window I’m using as an advanced Overview. You can zoom and resize and show or hide stuff from View.
With your document open select Window > New Window.
On the new window Window > New View > (your doc name) then View > Detach Canvas.
Since I’m on Linux I can then easily pin that window on top of others so it won’t disappear when I move it over the main Krita window and start to draw on the main.
Downsides:
You’ll have to leave that second canvas-less window open.
If you close the main Krita window before the detached canvas it’ll mess up your workspace layout on the next restart.
I had a different method to create that window, a plugin that automatically opened the active doc on a new window, removed all dockers, menus and tabs but kept the zoom slider. It also had a workaround to preserve the workspace if you closed the main window first, and it set it on top of others without any intervention – I think I used Qt so it should also work on Windows.
Unfortunately a power outage caused me to I accidentally overwrite the plugin with a blank file. Lmao. Still working up the courage to rewrite it.
(Edit: I just found a .pyc of it on a dirty _pycache_ folder of another plugin I wrote repurposing part of the code. I won’t have to rewrite it from scratch after all! )
Both methods have the additional downside of slowing down Krita’s preview noticeably if you have a large document with too many layers. Or maybe it’s just being slow anyway, I confess I didn’t do any rigorous testing yet.
About the the GUI, mine is heavily modified. A few changes like font size can be done through the settings, but the rest are a Python plugin. You can’t get the layer panels this compact or the brushes with the different search bar placement on vanilla Krita.
I don’t dare to share it as a plugin because it’s not perfect by any means. Look at the Tool docker at the bottom right, the sliders don’t have a minus button because I didn’t bother to rewrite the method for this control type, I only worked around them.
What I find really great about the fake overview is that you’re able to keep at different zoom levels and cropped to specific areas. I work with bleed so there’s often a generous padding around my canvas and I could never adapt to overviews in any software that lacked focusing features.
I successfully decomplied and turned that .pyc back into a plugin. I’ll be releasing it soon, you can try it then and see if it feels more natural. It pins itself to top by default and I’m pretty sure that functionally also works on macs.
Oh wow. I’ll test it out when you share. No rush. I’m finishingmy book these days so not a lot of time left for tinkering. Would love to get into scripting Krita though.
What are you working on with bleed? Printing to canvas or soemthing else physical? I’m doing my illustrations only with 3mm bleed for the book.
I’ll test your plugin when you release it, and give feedback.
Thank you so much for sharing your technique. it’s wonderful to see how you are working. I find it interesting about leaving the brushwork to the end to avid wrecking the shading. I will keep that in mind.
It’s no big, I wrote it primarily for myself and it already worked before I accidentally nuked it, there were just a few snags I wanted to smooth out. Already made the changes and I’m testing it for a couple of days before release to see if I spot anything else.
Yeah, I produce a lot of work for print and get very uncomfortable if there isn’t a bleed on my stuff that’ll never see a printer. I’m generous with it because I like to move the art around to find the most appealing placement. You never know what’ll look good. Either that or it’s my aphantasia talking, I don’t know what will look best without trying.
Being free to move it is useful when you have stuff like whole scenes for book covers but I don’t recommend what I do though, it makes computers cry.
I’m not sure that’s something everyone must avoid with the same zeal I do, I’m just really prone to fragmenting the colors. Painting is 90% keeping that impulse in check. Like most art things it’s one of that “it depends” cases.
Ruan Jia?! That’s a hell of a compliment, the man is amazing!
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