Proportion Practice - Do you use customized shortcuts?

Artwork sketchbook
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Title
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The title image just comforts myself after 5 or 6 hours of work.

Today I do some pratice with proportions. These worksheets are from Jey Ram which is completely free to download and a good practice material, credict. While copying from left to right, I also practice my observation skill.

These are the last two pages of this worksheet:

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shapes_Page10_fin
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Obviously, small movements cause huge differences. See YRH’s correction on my previous sketch Start Learning to Draw a Boy's Head in a Easy Way - #6 by YRH. So I’d like to pay attention to proportions to get much better results.

Actually I didn’t draw the 10-page worksheet for 6 hours. I spent almost 3 hours to twist Krita’s settings. :rofl:

I found myself in such a loop that “Oh this line is bending upwords a little bit more, I will redraw it” and press CTRL+Z. After pressing almost 1 hour of CTRL+Z, I just got tired and my fingers seem to refuse to work anymore :rofl:.

Hey, if undo is in such a common use, why I just bind it to a key that is more easy to press. So I bind redo to F. That seems meaningless but Z itself doesn’t stands for Redo at all, and so do V to Paste. I get used to it and everything goes pretty well in about 10 minutes.

Further more, if I put my left hand on the keyboard while my right hand holds the pen, I should make most use of the keys from A to G section(Golden Section!!!) :laughing:. So I removed many default shortcuts and rebind R for Rectangle Selection E for an hard edged eraser brush, S to Scrool Seperate Layers from the Pie Plugin and so on.

The replaced tool is relatively less used then these functions I set. I would like to select them using my pen when needed, but they should just give way out of the Golden Section of my keyboard. :wink:

So will you do the same thing? Please let me know! :hugs:

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Hi! Looks like a fun practice :slight_smile:

Not that I know anything about anything, but I would assume it’s best to also try copying more complex stuff (let’s say 1 complex copy and 9 simple copies), so that it’s a more realistic practice. Basically it boils down to practicing what you want to get good at, and you probably want your art to be more complex than these doodle faces :slight_smile: Again, not saying this is bad practice, just a stepping stone.

Regarding the shortcuts – yes, I do this, absolutely! I encourage you to experiment and find your ideal hotkeys. I use hotkeys A LOT, and Shortcut Composer plugin is essential to my setup as well.

I use Z key for undo, precisely because it’s much easier and less tiring to press than CTRL+Z. Most of my keys are located in the space between Q and V keys, and I make liberal use of modifiers such as ALT and SHIFT. It’s one of the reasons I like Krita so much, you can really customize the controls to your liking (well, on a desktop at least), and completely immerse yourself in the painting.

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Thanks YRH, you are such a great teacher! I will keep in mind of what I want to draw and try to push myself to the goal to bring them to you in the future. :wink:

I think I have a vague goal for what I want to draw. I learn drawing (and many other things) to express myself, and I have made up a story to achieve that. A good story needs some illustrations to show what’s Ryohai Virtul World Engine, what does my two OCs(one of which will represent myself) lookes like, and their daily life and adventures.

I recently work on my first original artwork, out of which I find myself still not good at characters. After practicing proportions today, I’d like to learn basic perspective and some other things to get a better stage next.

As for the shortcuts, I did set Z to undo at first, but my little finger was tired after holding CTRL for almost an hour :rofl:. So I choose F and use my index finger and it works pretty well, haha.

All in all, your kindness and generious guide is well appreciated! Wish you a good day!

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Ah, don’t mention it, I’m happy if I was able to help :blush:

I wish you the best of luck with your project! It’s good to have a clear goal in mind, it helps stay consistent with practice. I mostly draw without much purpose, and I can tell it hinders my progress.

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I do think good shortcuts are important, but they aren’t my focus at the moment. I do plan on setting up more in the future to speed up my workflow.

  • Currently, I still use the default Ctrl + Z, don’t plan on changing it also.
  • W for Magic wand / Continues selection tool.
  • L for Lasso tool / Freehand selection tool.
  • M to toggle 'horizontal mirroring" on and off.
  • N to toggle “soft proofing” on and off. I have this set up to toggle between normal and back n white image, to see the values.
  • Q for creating a new layer.
  • Ctrl + E to merge the newly created layer back to the main one.

These are the main ones I use, but even then I don’t use them very often.

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I try and work without keyboard as far as possible due to my lazy lounge setup usig Raspberry Pi and tablet. I have mapped the buttons on my tablet for the most important functions.
Button 1 = UNDO!
2 = re-do
3 = quick colour pick
Last button = ESCAPE!
I work with one finger on UNDO and another on colour pick.

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For such working conditions, a tablet like the Huion Inspiroy H1060P (also known as “New H1060P”) would be a good choice. It offers 12 hardware buttons + 16 additional buttons, which are realized by areas you point with the stylus instead of pressing a button. This way I have 28 keys available on my tablet and I don’t want to miss them anymore.

Michelist

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That looks great. If it works with Raspberry Pi it could be very nice

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