Magi’s Drawing Shenanigans #2 – Skulls and Blending

So, today, I actually managed to finish a drawing. Surprise, surprise! I wanted to draw this sort of skull to place in a corner on my stream… There’s no crypt without at least one skull lying around, right? So, how do you draw a skull in Krita, you may ask… And well, I honestly just tried to wing and then tried to blend the colours a little bit to create depths.

I started out with lots of circles. What looks like an abstract painting actually is… quite helpful. I honestly should do that sorta stuff more often as it helps with creating lines to guide the line art… guidelines? Either way, big circle for the head. Another flat circle at the side because the head’s bigger than normal. The small circle at the bottom for the “mouth”… Another circle here… and a few purple circles for the holes, because why not. Technically, doing sketches with different colours is something I used to do before but eventually, I just got lazy. It can be incredibly helpful to remind you to use different layers… but again, “Der Innere Schweinehund” and that sorta stuff. I get super lazy and forget about things.

From there, I then did some light line art. This was subject to change since it’s just the beginning stage of the drawing. The eyeholes ended up feeling a bit weird in terms of the proportions, so I ended up moving them around, changing angles and resizing them a lot using the selection and the move tools. Eventually, however, I just cut them out, moved them to a different layer, turned down the opacity and redrew them on another layer to have something similar going… and I did that multiple times until I was satisfied. Obviously, I’m never truly satisfied… In fact, the finished thing never seems to be perfect… but since I doubt that I can ever create something that is “perfect”, I end up trying to suppress those feelings and try to publish it anyway. I mean, I can always change it in hindsight but I don’t have to do it now, right? If I were to try to change/improve it now, I’d end up burning out and never getting shit done.

As far as the colours go: I created another layer and started out with some creme-like tone for the base. Then I added some dark colours for the holes and this little drop where the mouth is… then I added some rose-ish colours to the backside of the skull and started blending it all together until it worked out… But it didn’t. It was a mess. What you see here is the best I could do but I’m still not super fine with how the colours turned out and I may have to look up more blending tools or some tutorials for blending/blurring in Krita. The tools I ended up using the most here were WaterC_Watter_Pattern for the blurring, texturing and blending, as well as the Blender_Blur and the Watercolour_Fringe brushes for the colouring. On another layer, I added some black stuff while I turned down the opacity on the other colour layers. I sprinkled in bits of purple, rose, red, white and black into another. And at the top layer, I added more cream and some orange-brown-ish colour to complement it all. Then I basically used the other brushes that I mentioned above in the layer with the colour mess until it created some nice colours in the top layer. Ultimately, the only layer that people will see is the top layer with the colours from below shining through. At last, I redid the line art to be less rough and create a bit of a softer edge.

I feel like it turned out okay. It’s not the best thing in the world but with Twitch’s compression and different quality settings and whatnot, I’m sure that people won’t mind too much. Having a skull in the corner of the screen is probably quite cool on-stream. I don’t know. I just felt like it. I guess today I learned the most from forming those circles and then drawing the shape around those. The skull looks quite good in its shape. The colours aren’t optimal but once I get more practice with the blending and blurring tools, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out quite well. I really like how the textures turned out in the end. What do you think? Got any advice? Let me know!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!