Alien head

 

I keep making the same mistakes with craniums and it shows lol.

Postponed AGAIN!

 

Didn't have much time again, here's another 5 minute sketch with yesterday's brush.

Shortcuts Postponed

 

Didn't have time today, woke up from a nap not too long ago, here's a sketch with a new brush im using.

No snow

 So about yesterdays post, I was messing around with Krita shortcuts to completely change the way my left hand navigates the keyboard while painting and drawing.

What I failed to realize was how much slower it would make me at making anything... so that actually took maybe double or triple longer than it would have originally.

But regarding those keybinds... I think I'm onto something, and I'll be posting about it tomorrow.

Also, I really need to play Katana Zero again.

The quest for the ultimate shorcuts

 Can't type much but made this super quick, didn't know what i was making.

Creature's aren't too difficult

 

I didn't put any detail or time into this, but drawing animals seem pretty simple compared to people. I drew this up in 5 minutes or so, and I don't have any time for more today.

Who's resetting my keybindings.

 Even though I'm saving my Krita keybindings to a preset... they keep getting reset. I'm sure it has something to do with me dual-booting. Oh well, I think I'm gonna clean reset them anyways to something almost entirely custom.

Also, this dude, I don't know who he is or what he is...

I might suck at design

 

I drew this up in maybe 5 minutes, honestly I don't think it looks too bad - I mean, swords are pretty simple. Functional however is a different story, I'd imagine this idea makes blacksmiths cringe a little. I could definitely see something like this patter turn into a good design though, might make it in Blender one day.

Alright last floating head for a while promise

 I finally made the jump and am now drawing on Arch at full capacity. Speaking of which, Linux is super cool. I properly auto-mount all of my drives on startup now (windows does this by default), and make "symlink" folders that instead just point to my existing files on Windows. So, if I need a .config file, I can just point the folder to my windows, and it exists as one file for both operating systems. Super cool.

Screw plugins

 

By far the worst thing to manage cross OSes are Krita plugins, but after doing some thinking, I don't really care about plugins that much. I manged to change some settings to some one's I'm perfectly happy with. Gonna start my keybindings and inputs from scratch and make something cross platform portable without any plugin dependencies.

It's the year of HYPRLAND

 

 

So, about yesterday, I reinstalled my Arch system but I accidentally deleted my ESP, which is the thing that also boots all of my operating systems. Therefore, I had to reinstall Windows too, and now I have to get all my programs working up to speed like before.

Actually, because of it, I could only make that really loose drawing yesterday because all of my bindings were messed up, and I couldn't erase properly. I don't know why, but on top of Krita having horrible defaults, you can't just get things back to the way they were before. I don't know why you can't just carry over the resources folder and be up to speed after you load your presets.

But I switched from KDE Plasma to Hyprland on Arch, and it looks really aesthetically pleasing for a desktop environment. It also looks pretty good for workflows if you use multiple programs, so I think it will be a good long-time investment.

Just reinstalled both of my OSes

 

I cannot put it into words how terrible it felt when I found out I deleted my system ESP. I'll go more into it tomorrow.

Do not get a cheap screen tablet

 

Just some graphic shape design, need to make a drawing of wings for a friend but I want them to be custom made. I wouldn't want to copy just angel or demon wings off the internet and call it a day. Yes, I know it does not look great, but we're getting there since this was just the first one.

Also, don't get a cheap screen tablet - and no, Wacom does not automatically mean not cheap. You can get just get a decent monitor and/or colorimeter with a regular tablet. Make sure you buy a decent colorimeter though, some of the cheap ones use bio-degradable materials and their performance will decay within years.

I speak from experience. I bought a Wacom Cintiq 16 with my first paychecks ever from my first job as a waiter when I was 19. It was great and all, but I noticed I had too many issues with the color noise from the 

With my Cintiq 16, I thought I would get over the screen being so small, but ever since I started drawing again on my main desktop monitor, I just can't get over how much screen space there is. Also, for cheap screen tablets they usually use a plastic coating instead of a glass one, which scratches way easier. There's a big pool of scratch marks that I can see AND feel with my hand or pen. The last, but probably most annoying thing, is the color noise. I cannot, for the life of me, get over the terrible color noise this screen produces. It makes gradients virtually impossible to determine accurately and I find painting on my main monitor way more enjoyable. Sure the colors are off, but once I'm done painting I'll just color balance everything anyways.

Getting the hang of it

 I went to youtube.jp and searched up with the help of Chat GPT some realtime drawings of pros drawing anime. Honestly it helped a lot more than I thought it would, I was under the impression that process didn't matter all that much, but every time I learn from another artist I'm finding out that this isn't the case.

Maybe starting out with Andrew Loomis' advice wasn't that great for me in that aspect, or maybe I just took it too literally.

Eye'm tired.

It's late and I'm terribly tired after staying up 32 hours yesterday so I just wanted to draw something out real quick. I wanted it to be semi-realistic, but now after attempting it, I don't think I know how to draw a realistic eye either.

Also, I made a couple little command line programs with Rust that will convert given temperatures to celsius fahrenheit, and generate fibonacci numbers up to (n). Those were harder to do than expected.

How do they do it

 I don't know what ritual artists are doing to get perfect line art but they're not doing what I'm doing that's for sure. Cause if they did, it would look, well, not perfect at all... not even close.

Ghosts are pretty cool

 Been playing a bit of Phasmophobia recently and I really like the way the game plays out. My favorite ghost is the Phantom, they sometimes teleport to you and spook you a little, and they don't appear in camera photos. I don't really believe in ghosts (or more accurately, that they exist in our plane), but the idea is really cool.

I'm not a same-face slave

 If there's one thing people can't say about me, it's that I suffer from same-face syndrome.

Recently, I've been trying to figure out my strongpoints and weakpoints as an artists, and I think some of my strongpoints include a good understanding of form and form development and style variety.

Also, I just doodled this out randomly, but it kinda reminds me of Satoko from Higurashi.

Improved Layer Stack

 

Here's a little more from yesterday, I spent a good 20 extra minutes on the layering and shading. I originally just painted and didn't draw anything, but I didn't think that counted for "sketch-a-day". So, I drew something on top of her head, so technically, I did sketch...

Need to get a process down

 This is what some early stages of my current process looks like, note that it is very unfinished/polished... or even worked on.

But mostly, I was trying to figure out how to organize my layer stack using the new "inherit alpha" mode in Krita. It works like transparency but it inherits from below layers instead of up (like PS). The layer stack so far looks cleaner and more functional, but I will try to take it as far as I can.

The layer stack that is, not the drawing above.

Ever heard of Marvel Rivals

 

I've been playing a ton of Marvel Rivals the past few days and been liking it a lot. I'm not even a Marvel fan, I just know the popular characters. I picked up Magik since she reminds me a lot of Riven from LoL.

It's the year of OPEN SOURCE

 

I've been switching to a lot of free and open source (FOSS) programs recently because I think they perform nicer and will improve better than proprietary programs in the long run. I've been using Helix, Nomacs, Arch Linux, Krita, Blender, and a couple others I'm forgetting the names of.

Also, this is Linux's mascot, Tux.

IT'S THE YEAR OF RUST

 

 I've been learning the programming language called Rust recently and it's pretty interesting. I'll spare the nerdy details, but it reminds me of my early art days when I was learning something new no matter which direction I went. Programming isn't foreign to me though, I did some Java when I was a kid at 14, that's how influenced I was from Minecraft. I also did some more Java again in high school for 2 classes worth and learned some concepts there. That's pretty much my extent of programming knowledge, and I'm just learning the Rust language instead of programming concepts at the moment.

Also, this is Rust's mascot, Ferris.

IT'S THE YEAR OF KRITA

 

Krita is my new drawing program going forward and I'm not going to look back. The BRUSHES, the LAYER MASKING, the CUSTOMIZATION.

And don't even get me started... on the minimal RAM usage....

One GB of ram vs PS's Eight 

EIGHT GIGABYTES.

It's the year of Krita!!!

Also, this is Krita's mascot, Kiki.

Happy New Year 2025

 

I thought about this one a lot while I was drawing it. I only had a little under 2 hours for this sketch but it felt like a day. I couldn't get the likeness of them down and it was really bothering me. I did quite a few iterations of the first few sketches but just settled with this. There's a drawing like this by the original author I think and it looked so good, nothing like mine. I had to use a ton of reference but I couldn't get the likeness down, I don't know why, it really bothers me.