When I do drawings, I use Autodesk Sketchbook (I even bought the premium bundle and can do premium things such as using custom brushes), as I became very familiarized with it. Then I saw some art posts mentioning Krita, then I wondered if there were Android ports of it (I heard about Krita before, but I heard about it in Linux contexts; sadly my laptop has no tablet input). To my surprise, I found it, except it's not available for phones through Google Play Store. Then I found that there's a F-droid version, dating back to 4 years ago, and I managed to install it (despite the September 30th Android sideloading restriction thing, maybe because I uninstalled the Android Developer Verification app).
Initially, the window-format UI spanned beyond the boundaries of my phone screen, but then I found out I could rotate to landscape and tinker with the settings to use the smallest font size possible. It kind of worked. Then I proceeded with trying to draw something. First thing I tried was finding the equivalent of "synthetic paint" brushes (oil painting). I even tried to search the web for extra brushes and tried to install one I found labeled as "zeroc0il" (but I guess it's made for more recent versions of Krita, as it seems like the importing missed a lot of things from the bundle). Anyways, I tried to tinker with what it gave me.
Initially I couldn't draw a thing, and then I guessed "there's something about touch sensitivity in the settings", found what I suspected, cranked up the lowest pressure to 100% (because my smartphone doesn't seem to have touch sensitivity detection) and it worked.
As I was drawing, I began getting used to some of its interface which resembles GIMP a lot (and I'm very familiarized with GIMP on my laptop). The following is what I managed to draw.
Finally, I wondered if I could export the layers so I could use it in Sketchbook. I tried exporting a .psd file with simple exporting, and when I imported it in Sketchbook, it resulted in a flatten picture. Then I tried .tiff (because Sketchbook uses TIFF for project files) and it also imported as flatten picture. Then I saw the "export advanced" and tried it with both .tiff and .psd again; .tiff wasn't even recognized when I tinkered with the exporting parameters, while .psd format offered no parameters to tinker but a "resize", which I kept unchanged, and, only then, i was able to get the layers I made in Krita into Sketchbook. Interesting.
Anyways, Krita seems better than Sketchbook, I see it got lots of customization, advanced brushes, etc... unfortunately it's for tablets and I have no tablet...
(Also, this owl ended up extremely similar to the Megascops kennicotti one I sculpted in 3D in Blender, even though I was actually intending a Bubo virginianus when I started doing the initial mass drawing of an owl silhouette from scratch)
#krita #kritaart #inktober