Tutorial: an Illustration from A to Z with Krita

Published on 15 august 2022

Youtube: https://youtu.be/uYdEkOyFUn8
Peertube: Soon on the channel.

And here is the long 1h22min Krita video tutorial fully commented as I promised on the last blog post with the artwork.

It's a real full lenght course suited to beginners, but also advanced digital painters. It starts from scratch with default set of brushes, preferences and break-down all the process. The repetitive parts while painting were all accelerated and can be skipped easily (a timer in overlay appears on display) Check the Timeline codes under to navigate in the video.

Subtitle are unfortunately not available, sorry for my (heavy) French accent and poor vocabulary. It was too long to write them this time. I hope the auto generation will work and you'll have not a lot of trouble to understand me mumbling sometime.

I recorded over 6h of material, and at the end I was totally brain washed. Painting and talking while recording really overheat my brain, and I also recorded that under a super hot weather, 39°C , and I had to turn of all the fans to reduce the noise on the microphone. That was a real challenge.

Big props also to the OBS studio team (for the recording software) and Kdenlive team (for the video editing software). Of course, to the Krita team too!

The video was done with OBS Studio and Kdenlive, editing 1h22 of video took a long long time and was epic!

Timeline, Table of Content:

I copy paste the TOC here, because it might help search engines to find a part of the video. If you open the video on Peertube or Youtube, the timecode should be dynamic and you can click to access quickly to a chapter.

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:40 Chapter 1, Customisation of the Krita Interface (Intro)
00:01:31 Reduce size of toolbar icon
00:01:57 The Advanced Color Selector
00:02:41 Two columns of dockers
00:03:37 From Tabs to Subwindows mode
00:05:10 Third Flow sliders, and new toolbar buttons
00:07:14 Canvas border background color
00:07:46 Brush outline and cursor
00:08:42 Tool Options, not as a docker but in toolbar
00:10:02 Document creation, A4@300dpi sRGB 8Bit
00:10:33 The Overview docker
00:11:23 Navigation on Krita canvas, with shortcuts
00:12:16 The Default brush presets set
00:12:37 Chapter 2, Finding the idea (Krita artist contest)
00:13:43 Chapter 3, References with BeeRef software
00:15:54 Chapter 4, Thumbnails
00:16:27 Basics of Krita (Fill, Transform, Selection)
00:19:35 About values in painting, the big "scheme" for portraits.
00:21:23 Starting to draw the thumbnails
00:24:20 Painting colors on the thumbnails
00:25:31 The Blending Modes (on brush) Overlay
00:29:17 Filters of Krita (Curves, HSV adjustement, Color Balance).
00:32:37 The concept of "Dirty" brush preset, and cleaning them.
00:35:47 Chapter 5, Drawing. Transform of the thumbnail, resolution and layer setup.
00:39:09 Drawing (Timelapse)
00:41:47 Chapter 6, Painting under the line-art
00:43:37 The Deform Brush Engine
00:45:20 "Grain Merge" blending-mode on the line-art
00:46:45 Introduction to creating brush presets
00:51:21 Brush usage, hard edge, spikes, glazing and replacing colors
00:51:50 Paint under, Timelapse
00:52:55 Chapter 7, Paint-Over (setup)
00:55:04 Paint-Over (timelapse)
00:56:11 Adjustements, and self-criticism
00:56:46 Values, Reading Histogram docker
00:59:21 Values, fixing with Curves filter
01:02:19 Color temperature, fixing with Color Balance filter
01:03:50 Background painting (timelapse)
01:04:22 Silhouetting the character with the Lighten Blending Mode (fog)
01:08:10 Paint-Over fix, removing the squirrel's hears (timelapse commented)
01:08:52 Lens Blur Effect for the depht of field (Filter Mask).
01:11:46 A special thanks for the idea of the video
01:12:29 Another pass for thinner details (big timelapse)
01:16:27 (pre)Final, and saving/archiving the file.
01:17:56 Appendice, fix pushed "One day after" (timelapse)
01:19:55 The final artwork
01:20:05 Outro
01-21-58 Credits, Attributions and License

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Link to high resolution: https://www.davidrevoy.com/data/images/blog/2022/kiki-mascot-in-my-own-style_final.jpg

Credits:
Video and artworks by David Revoy
Kiki is a character design created by Tyson Tan (CC-By)
www.davidrevoy.com

Soundtrack:

Intro: Fabian Measures - Hanami (CC-By) - www.soundcloud.com/fogheart
Timelapse: Kevin MacLeod - Perspective (CC-By) - www.incompetech.com
Outro: Kevin MacLeod - Backed Vibes Clean (CC-By) - www.incompetech.com
SoundFX: Oriental Harp3 by Soughtaftersounds (CC-By) - Freesound

Edited with Kdenlive 21.04(appimage) on Fedora KDE 36