This time around our poor elf nerd has run into a couple of his classmates in the library, and they've convinced him to help them... study anatomy? Those two are gonna get him in trouble. I have a feeling the head librarian is onto them.
Check out the rewards in the attachments! You can also always find them in the rewards collection post, alongside all other past rewards you might have missed!
I'm still getting adjusted to the new way of painting I've been trying the past few months, working a lot more with cells of flat color for most of the process like I've talked about earlier. It's so weird how some days it feels like such a convenient and efficient way to paint, and the next day it can feel entirely foreign and weird. It made this piece take a little bit longer than I would have liked because of some work I chose to discard. So it wasn't quite as painless as the previous painting was, but I think I've arrived at a result I'm happy with. I do miss some things about some of my more carefully rendered pieces I've done in the past that I'm not fully reproducing in this workflow yet, so there's room for improvement there. Nevertheless, it's feeling like a healthy step outside of my standard painting method I've had, and is giving me very helpful perspectives on things.
Speaking of helpful, this past month I found a very helpful plugin for Krita that lets me use cursor gestures as hotkeys, as well as letting me set up a custom button panel. It's called Quick Access Manager, you can get it here if you want. The cursor gesture feature is the 3x3 grid on the left in the image below. When I press and hold a hotkey it calls up the grid and I flick the cursor in one of 8 directions, or keep the cursor at the center, to do the action I want when I let go of the hotkey. It's a great way to consolidate nine different hotkeys onto one hotkey. And I have different sets of these on different hotkeys. I don't like to move my hand around the keyboard too much when I work, so this is turning out to be a good way to only need a small handful of keys for whatever I wanna do.
Back when I used Photoshop and Paintstorm Studio I had custom panels set up with buttons for various things, and this plugin also lets me do that in Krita! That's the panel on the right side in the image there. I basically reserve the cursor gesture thingy for my most frequently used stuff like switching tools and brushes, and I put the less frequently used stuff on the custom panel. I hope you guys will find it as useful as I do!
That's all for now, but I've got another slightly simpler pinup-ish painting almost done as well that I've been working on in parallel with this one, and I'll hopefully have that posted soon too!