Alien with Asteroids, or Not
Fun project that wasn't too hard to do in Krita.
After working and reworking a store logo all day in Krita, I decided I needed to do something fun today, too. So, I took the old drawing below and worked with it in Krita.
I had the image in one of my art folders, so I copied it to my computer clipboard and created a new Krita project. Using the Create from Clipboard option puts the image into a layer for you to work with.
Alien Layers
I always struggle with knowing how to divide up a picture. With this one, I worked the foreground alien first then built the planet, space, and the asteroids that are in the final images last. Here are some of the alien build layers.
Looking at the canvas space that various parts take, I could have combined a few of these layers instead of working them separately. Like I said, I don’t always know the best way to divide up the elements of an image. I could still combine them in the project file using the combine layer function (Layer menu —> Merge with Layer Below, or just Ctrl + E), but there’s really no point in that unless it would reduce my file size.
Space and Stuff
Once the alien was done, I had to figure out what backdrop to put in place. The original drawing had a bunch of circles, but I didn’t want a bunch of planets since it wouldn’t look right to have so many planets so close together. I decided the giant circle in the original could become a large gas giant up in the corner over the alien’s head.
The space and stars were easy. I just used pure black backdrop and Krita’s LM light stars (background colour mix) brush to place the stars randomly. A bunch of color lines were drawn on the Planet Detail Layer with the regular Brittles-3 Large Smooth brush, then the Blender Blur brush mashed the colors around to make the planet more gaseous looking.
The asteroids are just a bunch of squiggles with a Basic-1 brush at 1 pixel. After that, I went back over them with a wider pixel setting. I did it sloppily so there would be gaps that I could fill with a slightly darker color for texture. (Not sure this was super successful.) I was trying to use the asteroids almost like an arrow to drive the viewer’s eye to the alien. I’m not sure this successful, either, but it doesn’t matter in this image much since the alien is so big.
Better with or without Asteroids?
The final products are below. I’m not sure whether I like it more with or without the asteroids.
It’s cleaner without the asteroids.
This project took me about 90 minutes. (It was just something fun I wanted to do after spending all day trying to create a store logo then recreate it with different colors.) Let me know which of the images you think is better.