Krita/Animtim
Krita's first training DVD
Timothee Giet has been passionate about comics-style illustrations since early on. After completing his art studies in 2001, he worked on a large variety of independent projects including magazine illustrations, concert decorations, records, flyers and animations. In 2008 he switched to the Linux environment and decided to once again pursue his initial interest: comic books. This led him to Krita in 2010.
In 2010, Krita was shaping up as an art program, but the community was facing a major shortcoming: a severe lack of documentation. In 2011, Timothee thus approached the community with a proposal: to develop a complete set of training videos from scratch, to help users master the entire comic book creation workflow from start to finish.
With the support of the community, Krita's first training DVD was thus funded and successfully completed within the 2 months deadline, featuring interface explanations and step-by-step instructions on the following topics:
- General interface: Document creation, overview of general interface, tools, dockers and preferences
- Frames: Grids, vector frames and shapes, alternatives
- Sketching phase: Alpha inheritance, brush settings and presets, sketching, transform tools, assistants for radial lines
- Inking phase: Inking with the sketch brush, bucket tool, patterns, gradients on erase mode, hatching tool,assistants
- Coloring phase: Solid colors, shading with Modes, brush settings (Sketch brush, Airbrush etc.)
- Export: Export options, file type conversion, import into Scribus, options and adjustments in Scribus, pdf conversion
The tutorials can be accessed on Youtube, where they serve as an essential introduction of Krita's interface and features to new users.
The full DVD is also available as a training DVD + comic pack, including 6 hours of HD video and the actual comic. All proceeds are used to fund the Krita Foundation.
Today, Timothee continues to contribute regularly to Krita, providing it with its first set of ready-to-use brush presets (now Krita's default starter pack), creating icons and templates, and discussing future development plans with the developers.
Interview with Timothee
Mid 2010, I started using Krita. I quickly saw a lot of potential in it to become a powerful painting application, and started a little comics project to test it in depth ("Wasted Mutants" short story). Reporting tens of bugs and feature requests all along, I developed a workflow to draw efficiently comic-books based on cool Krita features (brush engines, channels, blending modes, vector layers...).
May 2011, during the Krita Sprint, I proposed the "Comics with Krita" DVD+comics project, including a DVD tutorial and a printed comic-book (with my previous "Wasted-Mutant" story and another original one, "Wisdom-Mountain"). This project had several goals: to share my experience to help people get started using Krita, to make an example of real-life production with the comics print, and to help funding Krita development.
So in June 2011, I started working on it, with a 2 months deadline. During this time, we ran a community fund-raising to support the project, trying to get maximum 2000€ for those 2 months of work (which luckily was successful, thanks again to the community). Globally, I used one month to finish preparing the tutorial plan and comics page script, and to record the raw timelapse while drawing the simple frame example and 3 comics pages (and also the last step using Scribus to compile the pages together). The second month I did the video cutting in Kdenlive, added the tutorial texts in speech bubbles over it, and made the dvd package (html5 menu and cover pictures). My brother helped me composing the music, which was finished in August.
We started running pre-orders from July to September. During this, I looked for the best place to press the DVD and print the comics. In October, we made the production orders for the dvd press and comics print. In November, once everything has been delivered to Krita's "headquarters", I went to sign a pile of comics for all the pre-orders, and we could start shipping.
Since then, I keep contributing to Krita (icons, presets, templates,...) and using it in all my digital-drawing projects.
