Hello Krita Artists! 
This is a discussion thread and WIP thread for our Monthly Art Challenge for January 2026. Ask any questions about the challenge or share your works in progress.
The January Art Challenge was designed by @steve.improvthis.
When your submissions are ready, post them in the submission thread linked below.
Happy New Year everyone!
Pfffff… 
My first idea was to make a parodic travel poster about Mordor, but a quick Google search taught me it has already been made countless times, and better than I could… I guess I’ll have to search a bit more to find something off the beaten paths.
“Fly Middle Earth on Giant Eagle Airlines!” Seems underrepresented in a quick Google image search. 
What I had in mind was more like:
Great Eagle Airways*
(in the bottom in small letters:) *Only available for the return trip
But even if there isn’t this joke in particular, the search for “Mordor travel poster” brings quite a lot of beautiful results…
I just brainstormed what I’m gonna paint mine.
Wow… yeah… there’s a lot of Mordor Travel Posters… that is surprising. Did somebody do a monthly challenge with that theme?
Anyways… happy new year everyone!
Looking back at my WIPs, I realize I did not follow my own lines… lol
um… there were ships in the middle ages.
No idea if I’m going to go in this direction or not, but I liked the play on words…
The further we get in to January, the more likely I’ll move on to something tropical, or at least not frozen.
Thanks! I’m trying this brush for the first time, I like it so far. The devil in this one is going to be in the details, for sure.
And I’m really looking forward to everyone else’s ideas being even more incredible!
For me, this month’s challenge is an opportunity to learn more about using Krita’s text editor. Always before, I used CorelDraw for it’s easy on-canvas text editor. Krita’s text features always seemed difficult to me, but I understand there have been recent updates to the text editor. So I’ll be learning more about how to use it.
I used a second assistant here, the parallel ruler helped a ton when painting the aurora lights! (the assistant is in red)
Just a few more details on the water and ice, and then I’m off to figure out how to make the text look better.
Notepad or Word are text editors, also apps like Kate, Notepad++, VIM, Emacs, and many more are text editors.
And Krita in its current release versions has a text editor too, but one that is not a joy to work with, but a future Krita will get a newly written text editor, you could even test it and check out its abilities when you try one of the Krita NEXT Nightly versions. These are pre-versions of Krita development builds made for testing and for hunting down bugs before releasing them to the public.
You edit text with them, like with the editor you use to write in this forum. Text editors can have many different “shapes” and purposes.
Michelist
Cool that there are changes coming to the text editor! I don’t play around with the beta versions, so I’m not sure what goodies are around the corner, but I’m looking forward to them!
One of the things I’ve been wondering about is how can I do “Text on a path” in Krita. Right now, I’d resort to doing it best I can freehand.
I know how to put text on a path, circle, etc. in Inkscape, can Krita do something similar?
See the random screenshot below as an example. I’m talking about the word “Ireland” notice how it curves in a sort of wave up and to the left?
Last I checked, the improvements on the text editor are all under the hood. From my understanding, they are rewriting the base code of it… so unfortunately there are still no nifty tools/effects with the text editor. Effects like what steve requests are still not possible. I had to render the vector text as a paint layer on mine just so I can edit it.
Soon it can!
And it gets abilities other programs will want to have then too, because they don’t have them.
Call it text on steroids if you want to, and you wouldn’t exaggerate …
Michelist
@edgarej, I don’t know it but have to guess you haven’t followed that topic in full and may also have missed the posts from here on:
Text on path, of course, and so much more. Cool! 
Michelist
may I ask, do we post our FINISHED pics here? I just found out about this gem, I’m absolutely lost pls
