Fox

Last May I was playing around with Krita’s new RGBA brushes. It’s difficult to explain what they are, and RGBA isn’t descriptive as to what they are. In most graphics applications a mask is provided for a stamp used as the brush. This feature in Krita allows you to provide a color image, and it — color and all — would be used for the stamp. One side effect of this is that a grayscale image with bump textures can be used, creating the illusion of varied paint thickness on a brush by using the L*a*b* lightness channel as data for the brush’s stamp. If applied heavily the look of impasto can be achieved. Krita’s expansive brush settings can be used to control this by various ways. I don’t know whether I described this well or not. Krita has a demonstration video showing the wet variety of RGBA brushes that didn’t exist yet when I painted this, but it’s the same premise; view that if you’re interested in learning more.

Like with Keeping Watch this one began as a doodle as well, and with Kate’s encouragement it turned into a full painting where I experimented with brushes I created using the methods described above. I love experimenting with color, so I fired up Coolors, and pressed the generate button a few times until a palette popped up that was to my liking. I tweaked the colors here and there to make it harmonious with what I wanted to paint, but if my memory serves me it wasn’t anything drastic.

This is a practice painting, and it is referenced heavily from a photograph I found on Unsplash that for some reason I can’t seem to find no matter how I search for the subject matter. Composition was a bit different, and the fox was resting on rocks instead. The original image is 9921 × 7016 and would be about 84 cm. × 60 cm. when printed as intended.