This is a piece I did recently for a contest held by a member of a game forum (the characters there are fellow contestants):

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/ ... 38tpiz.jpg

In the final piece I applied a canvas texture in Gimp, but since this is a Krita forum I'll just submit the Krita piece. I absolutely Love the sketch brush, it creates such lovely, bold lines! For the colouring I did a separate greyscale layer for the texturing (don't ask me which brushes, I tried a bit of everything), then used another layer for colouring.

It was a whole lot of fun, so thanks Krita devs!

Thanks for sharing!

There's so much going on, I almost don't know where to start! A really nice mix of fun, surrealness and chaos! I love the "evil metal jaws of confidence crushing", the floating dalek and the monkey hanging off the dragons tail. The background is nicely impressionistic with a watercolour feel. It's like something out of a psychologists nightmare mixed with a saturday morning Nickelodeon cartoon.

The jagged, sharp outline of the stairs also gives it a nicely "dangerous" feeling.

Good fun!

Thanks for the comment! It was actually an art tournament of sorts. Prior to this final round, there were 3 earlier rounds with the themes of "Teeth", "You fall into a hole" and "Storm". The contest had 3 judges, so I drew each judge depicting one of the previous themes. That's why the whole thing is a bit messy.

I usually get things done in Inkscape, but I've always really wanted to achieve more "organic" feels. Gimp's interface never sat well with me for that purpose, so Krita's engines are a real joy! I love the interface bits such as easy brush size adjustments, zooming and the awesome feel of the sketch brush. I'm still slowly discovering Krita, but good job everyone!

valerievk wrote:Thanks for the comment! It was actually an art tournament of sorts. Prior to this final round, there were 3 earlier rounds with the themes of "Teeth", "You fall into a hole" and "Storm". The contest had 3 judges, so I drew each judge depicting one of the previous themes. That's why the whole thing is a bit messy.

I usually get things done in Inkscape, but I've always really wanted to achieve more "organic" feels. Gimp's interface never sat well with me for that purpose, so Krita's engines are a real joy! I love the interface bits such as easy brush size adjustments, zooming and the awesome feel of the sketch brush. I'm still slowly discovering Krita, but good job everyone!

Hi valerievk,

nice work! If you have any ideas for improving the sketch brush or any other brush engine, share! I always try to improve them but I need also feedback from artists

Btw sketch brush is adoption of the harmony project [1]
I somehow squeezed harmony in one brush engine for Krita [2]

[1] http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/
[2] http://lukast.mediablog.sk/log/?p=347

The sketch brush is absolutely Awesome! So I have no complaints there, really! It's an incredibly fun brush to play with.

I did another sketch here:
http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/ ... 38mk0l.jpg

If you're asking about brushes:
- I'm not too sure what the chalk brush is supposed to provide as opposed to normal brushes with different brush tips, nor does it feel that chalky to me.
- Normal brushes should come with better/more visible presets. For example, the default brush tip set comes with a splatter brush, but using it with default settings creates something of a mess. There should be a folder with presets where if you choose the splatter brush for example, it will automatically give a large spacing and maybe introduce random rotation, to give a more convincing splatter effect. (are there dynamic presets included in the first place? I'm not sure, now that I'm trying to compile Krita again I can't check)
- Speaking of presets, when users first look at the dynamics they see a pressure curve. It takes a while to notice that the other options are non pressure related. There could be something next to the curve with other options and presets (for example, fade-out).

The biggest gripe I have with Krita is actually not the brushes, but the editing options. Artists will often want to tweak their colours and contrast once a piece is basically done, and the way the curves behave seem a bit strange to me (again, I don't have the latest version of Krita yet, so I don't know if it's been addressed). For example, opening the curves dialogue seems to automatically load a preset. I don't want the image to be modified until I start tweaking the curve myself.

I'll admit it's not actually a "problem" for me right now in the sense that I just open up the final image in Gimp and edit there (though it's more annoying if separate layers are involved). Krita's greatest strength right now is, quite appropriately, its brush system, and you're doing a swell job there, so I'm pretty happy right now.

Well, actually, its biggest issue is accessibility. Several friends of mine seemed pretty interested in the Sketch brush too, but as far as I can tell they don't use Linux, and even if they do I'm not sure if they'd be able to install the latest version.

Funny composition.

I like the 2nd sketch a lot (the cao meimei one) !

I love your style. There is a lot to see in the first picture, small funny details. It also leaves room for imagination (at least if you're not familiar with the other contestants) - I'm sure it's Pikachu fighting that dragon!

The second sketch appeals to the minimalistic side of me. It looks like it could make a nice wallpaper.

Approximately how long did it take for you to draw these?

Yup, one of the contestants had a pikachu avatar.

How long? The first one took a few hours since I had to look up the avatars of other contestants and experiment with composition. Also, I really wanted to use it as an opportunity to test out Krita's various features and brushes, so that and fixing unwanted results took some time.

The second one... maybe an hour? I didn't pay much attention, but it didn't feel like a long time. The sketch brush does a nice job of taking care of those shading details for me.