Krita/Animtim

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"Comics with Krita" story

Krita screenshot

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.

Comics WIP

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.

DVD cover
Comics cover