Winter Resource Roundup
It is starting to get colder here in Britain, the last few days have been grey and foggy. It is important to keep motivated and working on projects as well as look after your health and mental well being during these darker days.
This months resource roundup includes some resources and news about Krita, PD Howler, Blender and other digital art software.
2D Digital Painting News
Concept & Illustration Lite Brushes Bundle for Krita
This is a new brush set you can try from an artist who uses Krita called Pedro Pitéu.
Blade and Quill Krita Tutorials
I’m not sure if I have mentioned this channel on the blog before but it is a great resource for learning about how to use the various features in Krita. Check it out on YouTube.
New Krita Tutorials About the Brush Engine
There are some new videos on the official YouTube channel for Krita painting software about making brushes. The brush engine in Krita is fairly complex to understand so these will be useful for anyone wanting to dig into it and make their own brushes.
RGBA brushes coming to PD Howler
I had hoped that this would be possible but I wasn’t expecting it and certainly didn’t suggest it. The developer has been working on making the painting brushes that use multicolor stamps in PD Howler to be tintable by any colour. This could allow for some really cool painting brushes in the program. (It was implemented in an update).
Tahoma2D
Tahoma2D is a free open source animation software forked from OpenToonz (which is also free and open source and what Studio Ghibli have used in their pipeline for some major works).
It had an update back in May of this year adding several new features and enhancements as well as bug fixes.
The thing I didn’t realize about these software’s was that they not only do hand drawn animation but they also let you do 2D cutout rigging, mesh transformations with the Plastic tool and particle effects.
3D Software News
Womp
Womp is a website where you can create some 3D art in a fun, intuitive way. It looks like it is using SDF technology a bit similar to something like Clayxels, Magica CSG or Dreams. It is currently in Alpha state and you have to create an account to use it, but at present it looks like it is free to try.
Blender Live Paint Filter
For Blender creators who want to render objects in an interesting painterly way this filter might be of use. It is available on Alan Wyatt’s Gumroad shop here. It certainly looks convincing, some of the examples are really beautiful.
I think it is using normal maps to create the raised impasto looking brush strokes. Personally I prefer doing it the old fashioned way with my hands but this could be a useful tool to create an under painting for further paint over work on a rendered image in the context of illustration and concept art.
The creator of the add on for Blender has worked on several other shaders that create artistic effects for some time now. He has a portfolio of his 3D work on Artstation.
Other
Upscayl
There is a free and open source AI image upscaler called Upscayl available for Mac, Linux and Windows.
Sometimes I have used this sort of technology to resize my images for making into prints or up-scaling small images for further painting work, although the program I use is AI Photo & Art Enhancer (not as catchy but it does the job) which has a few other useful features like a denoiser which is useful for cleaning up noisy depth maps. I will try this out at some point and see how it compares but I’m pretty happy with what I’m using at present.
Quest for K9 Game Development News
This is a cool game development project by VideoJamesNZ a game developer from New Zealand. As a digital artist and (casual) gamer I’m interested in how computer games are made and it is great to learn about the thought processes behind them which you can do so by watching his in depth video. The music for the game is being made by LR-Artoonist.
Thank you for reading
