Kiki the Cyber Squirrel (Prototype)

Kiki the Cyber Squirrel is the mascot I designed for Krita, a free and open source digital painting application. This is Kiki’s prototype version. At the time, I didn’t even have a name for her, and Krita had not yet decided her to be their mascot. This version of Kiki was used on Krita 2.6’s feature introduction handbook.

Kiki is a squirrel because the community discovered that “Krita” in Albanian means squirrel. People posted some squirrel based mascot ideas in the forum, but they were mostly realistic squirrels.

In my attempt, I used my typical anthropomorphic, robotic approach, which I think looks technologically advanced and closer to modern aesthetics. Her white base color reflects Krita’s default canvas color. Her bud-like ears stand for budding artists. These core design concepts were largely unchanged in later iterations.

This version of Kiki has a white-blue-black color scheme. It was inspired by Krita’s upstream project KDE’s default window widget theme at the time — “Oxygen”.

Krita website: https://krita.org/