Weekly 2018-03-04

Hi patrons! My week was going to be a week of production on episode 25, but that was until it took a special turn last Sunday afternoon: the long thread about refactoring the default preset in future Krita 4.0 started to be confusing and very hard to get a consensus to move on to the next step. The refactor of the brushkit was done (see the "Before" picture under) with plenty of new and cool presets; but the brushkit wasn't balanced for all the target usage of Krita, brush icons were repetitive and the brushes were not fitting together as a collection. It was necessary to sort everything, balance everything and redo the brush icons to give them a unique look. 

After discussions,  the Krita Foundation decided to propose me sponsoring to maintain the default brush presets: I had to integrate my own preset bundle with the current 4.0 bundle (a poll about brushes resulted in around 70% of Krita users were adding and using my brushkit 8.2). I also had to tweak the brushes already there to be more consistent, weed out duplicates, fix brokeneness, etc... Getting full responsibility over this task allowed me to take many direct decisions to rename, move, tweak settings, etc... 

The work took basically all the week: painting the brush thumbnail took time... For a quick example; on a list of over 110 items ; if you take only more than 15 minutes, it results in 1650 minutes, 27 hours ! But I wanted to have all the thumbnails feeling visually like the brush stroke they do on the canvas. So I had to redo sometime twice or three time until I found something that feels right. I painted all of them as 512x512 mini paintings with all the parts split on layer; a process I started with my last brushkit 8.2.

As I wanted to spend only a single week full time on this project (to not slowdown more the production of episode 25), I decided to take a couple of night to find the hundred hours necessary for redoing all the icons, relinking/renaming all the brushes from my previous kit and clean all together. That was a personal challenge and a parenthesis I'll remember on the production of episode 25!  

Next step on this brush topic will be more calm : adding more specific presets (screentones, pure digital engines, colored brush mask)  and then a full documentation with examples, video, etc... Also, testing the kit is obligatory before a release, and for that : perfect time, I have an episode to finish!

Weekly Live-Streaming

Even if I was in intense production mode for the brushes; I took a break on Wednesday to broadcast the "color-sketch" of a panel on the Weekly Wednesday Live-streaming. I kept the video (1h30) for replay at the bottom of this page.  Next Wednesday; I'll probably color something else, or explain more about the new brushes, or something else depending on what I'm working on.

Spring

On other news, Andy Goralczyk, director of the next open-movie Spring at the Blender Studio in Amsterdam, contacted me to show me a couple of first test render and see if it was following the art-direction of my speedpainting made in October. It does! It's always a surprise to see the characters going from 2D to 3D and suddenly rendered with cinematic lighting. (modeling: Julian Kaspar) I can't wait to see the final movie! You can see all the process of the Blender Studio on this movie in the Blender Cloud.

That's all for this week, I hope you all have a good end of week, thanks again for your support!