#kiki the cyber squirrel

[furrgroup]

My first time drawing a full illustration in Krita! How did I do? (Voted for on Patreon)

[canmom]

so chipspeech (which i learned about 10 minutes ago) is essentially an emulator for old voice synthesiser chips. but, ingeniously, it associates each one with a character design which is shown prominently in the software. each character has a brief bio on the website.

and you can already see the wheels of fandom turning! search for chipspeech and you find a lot of songs that are 'in character', with the lyrics and music video referring to these characters (for example). it's following the tracks laid by Vocaloid.

thinking about that... vocal synthesis software seems uniquely suited to associating elements of the program with character designs. you've got a ready made narrative: this synthesiser is the voice of this character. if I make a song using the Hatsune Miku software, it is as if Miku has come from where she's hiding in the wifi to sing for me. that does a huge amount to popularise the character and the software! now if I search for Miku on Pixiv I find over 600,000 pictures, and it's hard to overstate just how much stuff she's appeared in.

other software sometimes has mascot characters, for example Krita's Kiki the Cyber Squirrel who you see every time you launch the program (notably in the trans flag colours)...

and some of them can become a little culturally iconic, like Blender's stock model Suzanne the monkey, or Tux the Linux penguin. but it seems much more rare for a fandom to spring up around these characters. something about having a voice leads us to want to imagine them having an identity.

(other hypotheses: maybe it's also just a matter of having a really fantastic character design - most vocaloids aren't so popular as Miku, she truly is iconic. on that front, it will be interesting to see what becomes of Xenia, the alternative Linux mascot who is a trans foxgirl lmao. alternatively, maybe the open source mascots simply don't have the force of Krypton Future Media's marketing budget behind them - but I don't think that really explains why the vocaloid characters are so compelling)

(further consideration: maybe the popularity of vocaloid just an offshoot of the existing idol culture and I'm reading too much into it? vocaloid isn't nearly so popular outside of Japan, and I'd wager people who are into vocaloid might be into Japanese stuff in general.)

[girlballs]

FMK: Kitty (AROS), Kiki the Cyber Squirrel, Xenia (Linux)

i dont think we should kill beautiful women so. fuck kitty, marry xenia, uh....kibbitz with kiki

[jkage-94]

Kiki the Cyber Squirrel fan-art~

Drawn in Krita ofc ;)  

[struck-by-the-rain]

the splash art is rly cute!!! it's of their mascot (kiki the cyber squirrel)!! redditors just have no whimsy in their hearts

ive been on r/krita to look stuff up and saw thissss on the top posts of all time,,, like howw are these the same level of bad? the furry splash art is cute and you won't survive the winter!!! redditors have some whimsy in your hearts challenge!!!

[nifaumo]

Kiki the Cyber Squirrel

[goshaag]

Kiki’s kicks of the day

[hightide-error]

drew Kiki the Cyber Squirrel, the mascot of krita! originally just did lineart for a PCB design a few months ago, but I went back and colored it in today. also added a background and stuff

[tysontan]

Chromatic Splash

A new startup splash picture I did for the next version of Krita! Hopefully we can see this in use in Krita 3.0.1!

[goshaag]

sum cybersquirrel

[goshaag]

For some reason really wanted to draw these two in one picture. Characters are Kiki and Konqi, mascots of Krita and KDE respectively, have met not by a chance, but because both are designs by @tysontan.

[goshaag]

(via Kiki v4-x - 3D model by goshaag (@goshaag))

[goshaag]

After watching @tysontan‘s livestream, I wanted to do only 2 things: give Krita another try and draw Kiki.

[goshaag]

Don’t play with brush settings!

2nd time drawing Kiki! Doing it properly this time - in Krita. It crashed only once.

[tysontan]

Krita tutorial book by Scott Petrovic is now on Amazon! #1 New Release of Design & Graphics category, too! KUDOS to Scott for writing this helpful material for all Krita users and giving me the chance to paint for the cover (my first cover art, too -- although I was slow as a snail...XD) 

You may view the larger picture on my DA gallery.

The profit of this book will help the development of Krita. Thank you very much for the support!

In case you don’t know, Krita is a free and open source digital painting app that I have been using as the primary tool for years.

[Krita official website]

[tysontan]

Kiki’s Running Sequence

A picture I did for Krita, an open source paint app which is my primary tool. Kiki the Cyber Squirrel is Krita’s mascot which is also designed by me. The next version of Krita will feature animation capability as well as faster performance, I tried to put up a running sequence to reflect them in this one.

Krita Monthly Drawing Challenge of September is on-going, the topic is Kiki. Join us!

A bit of personal report

Sorry for being not so active for a long while again! There was a huge art block, busy at work, and most of my spare time was spent on writing my project. It’s getting better, though!