Kiki the Cyber Squirrel is the mascot I designed for Krita, a free and open source digital painting application. This is the splash art I created for Krita 2.8, which was Kiki’s official debut as Krita’s mascot.
In this version, I changed Kiki’s design over the prototype version drastically. She now looks more cartoonish, and her head-body proportion is closer to that of a typical mascot. Her robotic nature is largely omitted, so she looks more generic. Her color scheme also changed to match Krita’s new logo (cyan-magenta-yellow). In order to build a more visually stable color palette, yellow was dropped, cyan was changed to sky blue, and magenta was changed to pink. The new pastel colors also work with Kiki being a cute girl.
I was going to make this version a fixed design for Kiki, but I got tired of it when I was drawing a new splash art for Krita 4.0 in 2017. I then began to give Kiki a new design in every new splash. To stabilize her color scheme even further, I took out sky blue in 2020, and increased the amount of black/dark gray in the color palette. Her base design concept remains largely unchanged.
It seems people tend to draw Kiki in this first version. I think it was either because of it being the first time people saw her, or this version is indeed the easiest one to draw because I held back the robotic details.
Krita website: https://krita.org/
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