This is not what I'd call great art:



However, it was a good way for me to test out Krita and see if it could do what I wanted.

Don't ask me for the name of that fuzzy guy who made the wings, 'cause I don't know. I just made him up for this comic. FWIW, the font used in the lettering is Webletterer from Blambot, which is free subject to some conditions.

...still, it made me smile.

So, were you able to do what you wanted? What were your first impressions like? (Welcome, by the way! )

Kubuntiac wrote:So, were you able to do what you wanted? What were your first impressions like?

To answer both questions:

• The text shape was the feature in Krita that I was most interested in, and that worked out pretty well. The main downside of it was that I couldn't figure out how to set the default font for the text, so every time I had to make another text box, I had to change the font from DejaVu Sans to Webletterer. Also, I would have preferred that the default size of the text box be smaller, but that's a minor thing. Still, I was able to have text where only some words were bolded, a feature I was looking for that was not present in the Gimp. It was also nice to have all the lettering be within a single layer, rather than have each text box be its own layer as in Gimp.
  
• The frames were done with just the raster rectangle tool rather than the vector rectangle shapes because at the time, I couldn't figure out how to change the color of the rectangles. (I later figured out that it was the Styles docker that handled that.)
  
• I really wish the dockers wouldn't expand downward sometimes (e.g. when the Tool Options docker appears) so that the bottom of the window fell below the bottom border of the screen. I'm using Krita on a Tablet PC, so the screen isn't that big. (And it's a Wacom-enabled Tablet PC, which is a reasonably sane choice for a digital artist.)
  
• I was looking to see if the recent version of Krita (2.3.3) would crash as easily as the older 2.1 version that I had tried out. So far, it's been stable, and it didn't die when I was making my little test comic strip.

Generally speaking, I'd say that Krita's big advantage is that it's useful for those who'd rather primarily draw in raster format but need a few vector-oriented tools here and there, like for example, text boxes for lettering and resizeable rectangles for comic book frames. It's especially nice if you need to go back and forth between tweaking the drawing and tweaking the lettering and frames.

The expanding tool options will be fixed in the next version.

Call him Squee!

Madman wrote:Call him Squee!

I *like* it!