#yknow what. maybe i will finalize this. the old art was a color sketch and was never finalized

[mijikai-tan]

I can't believe it's been 6 years... almost feels like it was yesterday

[adelle-ein]

going to start posting wips here instead of twt. i want to draw more group scenes and backgrounds and just generally be more ambitious, even though my main focus is and always has been improving how my people look i wanna get better at everything. this is an idea i thought of for an anniversary drawing and i decided to just go ahead and do it now

also soft-painting-small looks bad at big sizes huh maybe that's. why it's named that (i don't have a go-to sketch/line brush in krita i just keep trying different things)

anyway i used csp more again in the last month bc a) i had a new ssd and Could b) still adapting to krita and it was stressing me out and i was trying to improve my anatomy and struggling bc learning to use krita was slowing me down. but being reminded of how much celsys sucks and how i need to not rely on csp sticking around made me start working on adjusting to krita again

thoughts on that below the cut (rambly and definitely not of interest to anyone who isn't also extremely interested in digital art programs)

like i said my main motivation in making the switch: celsys sucks and is untrustworthy. krita's excellent filter variety and way way better brush engines and amazing paintbrushes are huge incentives also though and i think given time and money and support it could easily outdo csp.

csp has so many impressively flashy features that i just...did not use or find useful in application. like the 3d models - couldn't get them working at all on my old computer and then when i could on this one...they're hard to pose, finicky, don't look as good as similar modeling programs, etc etc...i just did not end up using them much and when i did i didn't really know how and they often made things look worse. really they were only good for doing like. fashion poses for outfit design when i didn't want to spend time on the anatomy. vector brushes didn't work for me at all and just made my lineart look really stiff and uglier than ever (and then i decided to ditch lineart altogether which. smart move i think bc it is not my friend.) basically csp has loads of what look like incredible time saving features on its homepage etc, and then in actual execution i didn't really find any of them practical to use. *paul hollywood voice* all style no substance

ANYWAY all of that being said the only things i really miss from csp are the one click export buttons, the change layer to drawing color button, and finally and most of all just the general performance and practicality of it. csp is designed for a reasonable newbie to pick up and use. not quite as much so as like sai or medibang but pretty accessible. krita is just. not. at all. probably the hardest of these programs to learn from a technical standpoint. it just has SO MUCH and is generally made by and for people with above average tech skills which can make it more confusing. like the way layers and groups work is fundamentally different from the common, accepted way ps/csp/sai/everybody uses. and sure maybe alpha inherit is technically Better than clipping masks but it also makes things more challenging and less accessible. very linux design yknow. it is harder to just open krita up and Use It without looking up how to do specific things, it is harder to get away without reading documentation and watching youtube tutorials and memorizing keyboard shortcuts, you need to know how layers work and how to cut down memory usage in a file, basically you can't cut corners in learning krita like you can with similar programs (esp if you are like me and have been playing in said programs since you were. maybe 4)

and of course all that being said krita is a small dev team making an open source free product, whereas celsys adobe etc have massive teams and $$$ at their disposal so of course it is not apples to oranges and this is not a criticism of the krita foundation, just that it makes the product harder to learn and use and i get why people are turned off by that. i'm turned off by it! and all this hinges on your pc even running krita because it is more demanding than most (in most cases i've seen at least. definitely seen some people say they have issues with csp and can run krita, computers weird.) but it sucks that a few features are prone to issues no matter what. as cool and intriguing as so many of the features are...gmic plugin is crashy and liquify tool just lags to the point it's unusable. :(

but i don't want to end on a negative note and make it sound like i hate krita, krita's great, it's just never felt quite as natural as sai and csp have in the past so that makes things more uphill with it. but i'm trying. and trying to get over my Very Bad Social Anxiety to post on krita-artists and ask for help from *shudders* Knowledgeable Strangers when i don't understand things

anyway uhhh krita is hard and art is hard but i think it'll be worth it and also fuck celsys