Illustration: Tiggles

 

This is the second drawing of a toy Ive kept since my early childhood. One of my first along with Spot, the dog toy I drew a few months back. Tiggles (Pronounced tie-gels) is a much worse shape and might be a little scary to any kid who inherited now. I drew it in Krita, which I like more and more for drawing on my iMac and after doing the initial pen and ink drawing, added a couple extra layers. One colour layer with the toys electric green eyes and some more subtle red on the nose with light orange in the mouth and another in with some greyscale shading. The grey won out in the end, but I didn't delete the other layers in case I change my mind later. 

The whole thing took about 3 days and about 15 hours. I had to redraw the darker sections as they were too light for contrast after I started drawing the bulk of the fur. I used a solid black and a very dark grey to five the lines a little more tonality. 

Spot: drawing/dessin (Krita test)

Since we are all inside for the rest of our lives, I decided to test Krita, the free open source drawing program. I have had it for a while but never tried a real project on it and if  there ever was a time - this is it.

The subject is a toy from my childhood I managed to hold on to all these years. Spot. The dog toy I received because I couldn't have a real dog at the time. Even though he has been loved to death... there is almost no fur left on him, he still seems real enough to me. Oddly having him still has helped me get through the death of my first dog and more recently it's nice to see him on my desk now that my dog Watson has passed away as well.

Krita performed fairly well, a few bugs and a few weird conventions to get used to. It does animation as well and I might try that out too some day. The brushes are really good! I don't paint so much but the drawing and inking tools were better than Affinity Photo but not quite as good as Sketchbook Pro. I did take it into Affinity photo to add some noise  text because I was frankly too lazy to see if I could do it in Krita alone.

The software is one of the open source softwares that seems to be in high gear to get better these days. Here is a sample of the new brushes they are going to implement soon... pretty amazing.

Because this was a test and of a beloved toy, I put a ton of detail into the drawing. It was a challenge to try and show the areas the furs had been rubbed off from years of being held and petted. I am not sure I succeeded in that but the it wasn't because the app was lacking.