Kiki’s Unplanned Canvas Expansion

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This is the splash art I created for Krita, It was used from version 5.2.3 to 5.2.15.

Krita is a free and open source digital painting application. Kiki the Cyber Squirrel (the character in this picture) is the mascot I designed for Krita. I also provided, and has been maintaining, most of Krita’s simplified Chinese translations for the application, the documentation, websites, and everything.

Krita website: https://krita.org/

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The Unplanned Canvas Expansion and Rushing

You might have noticed that I gave this picture a strange title of “Unplanned Canvas Expansion”. And during the 1.5 years span of being Krita’s splash, it was never released on Krita’s or my website. There are reasons, of course.

First let me show you the complete composition of this picture:

The splash used only a small portion of the full image — so what’s point of drawing the rest? In fact, this wasn’t intended to be Krita’s next splash art, but rather as promotional material for its 25th anniversary Steam Sale. The original request specified a 2.15:1 ratio (4750×2160). However, perhaps dues to inexperience, I was told near completion that Steam required a bunch of images with unusual ratios — some shown above, and more added later.

To work with those ratios, I had to expand the composition over and over again: the upper-body-only character became full-body; the initially hand-painted 1/4 disk was redrawn using shape tools as a full circle.

The biggest problem is that the original composition’s camera angle was slightly upward-looking, and to enhance the visual impact, an ultra-wide angle lens was chosen to exaggerate the hand holding the stylus. Now that the entire figure needs to be depicted, as a makeshift solution, it has to be drawn in a pseudo-fisheye perspective centered on the torso. No one in their right mind would use the torso as the center of a fisheye perspective — the body would appear plump, the head small, and the feet shortened — the full-body image just looks somewhat off.

And since the Steam Sale opportunity came unexpectedly, I had very little time to draw it. Moreover, after the pandemic, the workload at my workplace was quite heavy, and my creative ability had not yet fully returned at the time, either. I did my best to just rush it out. The anatomy, design, details, and cleanup are all quite rough, and I’m not fully satisfied with the result.

Design

Kiki’s design in this picture largely came from the previous splash:

I originally planned to simplify Kiki’s design from the previous splash by removing the hard-to-render semi-transparent, reflective material and add three-view references. But I wasn’t satisfied with the result and never found time to complete them.

Used as Krita’s Splash but not Released

Perhaps because the previous splash art had been in use for years, the Krita team decided to replace it with this picture, adding “25 years of Krita” on top. On one hand, the splash uses the initial composition without exposing the somewhat wonky lower body, and the eye-catching color scheme works well in small size. On the other hand, due to the typography of the splash screen, the image was flipped horizontally, and the somewhat wonky face seems more obvious after the flip.

At that time, the official Krita website had switched from WordPress to Hugo. I wasn’t familiar with Hugo and couldn’t edit the mascot page directly as before. Being too busy at work, I had no energy left to learn it, either. There wasn’t much to talk about anyway — the picture has no theme. I decided I should release the picture with the three-view reference I mentioned before.

So this dragged on until the next splash’s completion. Feeling it couldn’t wait any longer, I did some quick cleanup — mainly filling transparent holes in the characters — and released it.

What I have learned

The draw process of this picture starkly revealed that without planning, merely “following the flow” leads nowhere. Ironically, this had been my way of creating for a long time – starting by randomly placing a circle anywhere on the canvas and relying on the app to modify poses and compositions afterward. I increasingly feel that it hinders not just my growth, but even the maintenance of my drawing skills. My weak posing and composition abilities might have something to do with this habit.

Especially after drawing many pencil artworks (early 2026) and reviewing this piece’s creation process (mid-2024), I value planning, observation, imagination, and careful execution more than ever — it was a valuable lesson.

Source File

If you are interested, feel free to download the source file and have fun with it: Source File.