What can I do with krita ? Une bande dessinée !

I have been introducing the new features of krita 1.5 in this blog for more than a week now, and before I get bored (and you get bored), today, I will present a step-by-step work with krita. One of my favorites reading are “Bandes dessinées” (comic book for Shakespeare, manga for my far east friends), so I will try to create one.

The draft

Usually when they draw a balloon, great cartoonists start by a draft with the most important element of the scene. I did this part on a piece of paper, while I do believe it is possible to do it in krita, I am pretty sure you require a tablet to get a decent result, and I only have a mouse. So here is the numerized version of my draft :

The final strokes

The second step is to make the final stroke, in the step, the cartoonists will use a tracing paper, we will use layer, and even multiple layers.

The background

So in a first layer, I will draw the background and the border of balloon :

Nearly the guy
Now I will draw the man except for the left hand and arm, which I will draw on an other layer as it ought to be on top of the aquarium :

The aquarium
Now it’s time to draw the aquarium, we will use two layers, one for the fish bowl and one for the fish, it will ease the work of the colorist :

Left hand
So you remember that currently the poor guy is one-armed ? It’s about time to draw his left arm :

And the final result is :

If you are carefull, you might have notice that the aquarium is not at the right place, it slightly too much away from the man, but with the help of the group layer I will move both the bowl and the fish at the right position, at the same time :

And now, it’s up to the colorist to finish the work. But he isn’t here today, so you will have to wait for a few day before you get the end of the drawing.