Hi fellow Krita artists!
Have you mastered the art of finishing a piece on time?
When you’re working on an image in Krita and reach that point where it starts to feel finished —
my question is: what criteria do you use to decide it’s done?
How do you stop yourself from endlessly tweaking layers, switching brushes, or adjusting colors… ad infinitum?
Personally, I struggle with this a bit.
I easily fall into a loop of
“just one more small tweak…”
→ one more layer
→ ..ohh look at that!..
→ now just slightly more contrast here and…
→ → →
Sometimes this has resulted in me completely overworking — or even ruining — an illustration.
On occasion, when feeling unsure, I’ve asked others for feedback, with mixed results.
Often you get something like:
“Maybe you could add one more detail here…”
…and suddenly I’m right back in the decision loop again
(Of course, it also depends on how you ask for feedback.)
So, before this turns into an epic:
How do you personally decide in Krita that a piece is finished?
Do you use rules, checklists, time limits, or personal “stop signs”?
Best regards,
Carl
For not getting lost in brushes, I normally already decide beforehand what brushes I use. When I was a beginner I had a different brush for every single thing you could possibly be drawing in a piece but nowadays I have a pack of about five general purpose brushes I use for pretty much everything and one or two stamps I use regularly. It’s not so different than working in traditional, now that I think about it.
For me an artwork is finished at the point where a normal viewer would not notice a difference anymore. Every change that isn’t significant enough is usually not worth doing. Since you’re the artist even small changes feel important but that feeling can betray you. My trick is to zoom out extremely until the canvas is very small, like almost thumbnail size. When what I do does not change the thumbnail much anymore than I know I get diminishing returns and it doesn’t really help to add stuff anymore. Just clean up and be done.
The same trick also helps me see general mistakes in lighting, shapes and composition. When it’s very small and you can still see what it’s supposed to be, then you’r on the right track.
Asking other people is usually not of much help. Either they will always have ideas about what you could add or change or (what usually happens when my husband sees me working) they think you’re finished when there’s actually a lot more you can do. But that is to be expected, they don’t have the same baseline and understanding of what you want to do with your artwork as you. Even when you ask others artists, it’s still the same, they can’t read your mind after all and have probably different goals for their own works.
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