Is Digital Drawing For Me? Experimenting with a mouse & Krita
I'm debating if I should buy a Wacom tablet, the thing is I don't really know if digital art is something I'd be interested in for more then a week. I like drawing and painting but I don't do it so much anymore, I'm wondering if the convenience of using painting software to streamline the process and allow more experimenting might reinvigorate my creative muscle.
There is a drawing tablet available locally for around $100, so it's in the affordable range but first I need to prove to myself that I'd use it and not just have it end up in a drawer somewhere.
So I'm going to challenge myself to create ten (10!) drawings with this cool new free (open source) software that I just installed on my desktop. I'm going to be using my cheapo mouse to etch out the masterworks sketches. After number 10 is complete I should know if It's something I like doing and if I would benefit from having a wacom drawing tablet. That's the plan, If however I don't get to drawing number 10 then I guess it wasn't meant to be and I can invest in more fidget-spinners instead.
First up as drawing number one, my first sketch using the drawing program Krita, I will make my name into a banner image for my Steemit blog page.
The first thing I noticed is how easy it was to get to work with Krita. I've used Photoshop before but never any serious attempts at digital painting much beyond making memes. I'm using Ubuntu Linux as my OS, the program was available as a Linux appimage on the Krita developers website https://krita.org . This is the first time I've used the appimage format but it seems to work fine and installed instantly with just one click to make it executable, nice. (Krita works on Windows and Mac to)
The interface is really quite fast even with a clumsy and awkward mouse. You left click to open a chooser wheel for different brushes right on the courser without having to look to the menus on the side, the tools all have hotkeys so you can quickly switch between them, and the layers all seem to behave sanely. I see that Krita also has some animation tools that may be very interesting to explore in the future.
Having things on different layers makes switching things up and experimenting really quick, sure this is nothing new after using Photoshop (or Gimp), but it's all very quick and designed really well for digital drawing. Just getting familiar with Krita makes me want a tablet to make full use of it, but let's not get ahead of ourselves with that.
I changed the background to black, got rid of the shadow, added some more brightly colored hair and cleaned up the original fill inside the letters.
So there it is, my new banner for my blog page! One drawing down nine to go before I prove to myself that I should buy a drawing tablet ;D
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.
