Well! The biggest update is the day and night versions have been finalized for the beta release of Fedora 36. Obviously we chose Deepika Kurup to inspire the wallpaper and had a mind map session as well as some thumbnails that steered us in the right direction.
We kept in mind the concepts we’d talked about at our first mind mapping session, Nature/Water Cycle, Transparency/Reflection, and Filter/Purification. Eventually we discussed an artist called Nobuhiro Nakanishi, who’s layered artwork uses rectangular glass plates to create immersive landscapes that form a wide landscape.
Mo proposed, “layered shaped glass textured landscape, maybe vertically taller than Cathedral Dusk to show layers of ocean or layers of soil beneath.”
I could draw the landscape’s textures to hand over to Micah who could take them into blender. Like an artist creating a fabric’s design, and handing over the finished fabric to someone who can drape it on the mannequin into an outfit.
I came up with the abstract landscape below based off the surrounding inspiring imagery. Each part of the landscape would be partially transparent pane and because it was digital, we could have clouds and parts that wouldn’t logistically make sense in the real world.
So where were we last week? I had the general landscape figured out, some of the trees blocked in with leaves texture, but the three blocks of land and water still needed attention and I was having a tough time rendering the clouds.
So I decided to just turn that layer off so I could hopefully come up with a better cloud rendering.
To create this landscape in Krita, I used a bunch of clipping layers. For example with the grass. I used the selection tool to draw a shape, used the bucket tool to fill it, and then you do ctrl shift g to create a clipping group folder. Once the clipping layer is on you can only draw on that shape. If you try to draw outside of the shape it won’t show up. And the beauty of it is you can have multiple clipping layers on an object.
Which is great because if you want to change an aspect of it later on, like the base color to be darker or a different color it won’t erase all your hard work painting the texture.
Instead of making cloud shapes with the bucket tool and painting within that shape- I decided to use a transparent brush to softly bring them to life and keep them lighter and loose.
The background clouds were the first ones I was happy with and once I added the fake light source in the back it started to pull a lot of the elements together. Having that common theme of a little yellow light was helpful.
Then Mo reminded me that it needed a different dimension so the canvas size had to be changed.
Lots of little changes went on in between these two images. Added the front clouds, the little fish, the rest of the trees, the leaves texture, and more detail in the grass.
For the night version, I thought about taking it into gimp but because I already had all the elements in individual folders I started off by just duplicating the file. And since most of them had masking layers I could either change the base color, like with the sky, or I could just add a blue tint over the whole part.
Each pane got different levels of blue to try and keep the levels of contrast. I moved the fish to imply they were swimming somewhere different now, as well as the clouds.
I’ve already gotten a great amount of feedback on both of these! Taking this night version, which is honestly more like a dusk version, and making the sun into the moon to take it full nighttime mode has been suggested. Moving the clouds on the right so it’s not such a heavy stack of clouds is going to happen.
And for the day version playing around with the blue sky, potentially adding butterflies or birds, and looking at the trees on the right to see if they work better as islands over the blue water instead of being enveloped by the wave.
I worked on a few other things but this was the majority of my past week so wanted to lay it all out :)
