 So I just want to introduce everybody to Madeline Peck. I've had the pleasure of mentoring Madeline Peck for the past, I don't know, it's been since the pandemic, right? It's been, it's gonna be like almost three in the spring. Wow, okay. And Madeline's very talented illustrator and artist that we are so pleased to have in the Fedora community and she's over the past few releases been our lead designer on our wallpapers. So in this talk, you're gonna learn how she does it. So take it away Madeline. Yes, all right. So creating Fedora wallpapers in Krita. Let me make sure that my notes are working. So before I jump into the how and the why of the wallpapers being created in Krita, I think it's important to ask and sort of ramp up this conversation slowly. Like why does each release of Fedora need a different wallpaper? And right here on this little iBook, we have the first ever Fedora wallpaper which was released with Fedora Core 1 in 2003. And not that I don't think its minimalist approach wouldn't do well. I mean, I'm kind of, I'm really liking the subtle clovers that have been edited probably in GIMP. But it has been two decades and there's a few reasons why there's a revamp every release. Firstly, it would probably get boring, honestly. It's just more fun. And I think a lot of users of Fedora really look forward to the new visual that comes along with the update. And then also, there's a clear indication between releases, if you downloaded the software and your wallpaper was still the same, you'd be like, is this, has anything changed? And thirdly on social media and blogs where the update is being promoted, it's helpful to have related imagery. So how many wallpapers do we have? There's quite a lot right now. And I think I just updated this recently. There's release 37. So in this little screenshot, there's only Fedora 18 to Fedora 34. So just a small fraction of the entire gallery. But everyone probably has their own favorite. There's similarities between all of them since they follow the same visual rules. Wallpapers are something you look at for a large part of the day. So on top of the basic rules of design that take composition, contrast, hierarchy and movement into consideration, it should also be aesthetically pleasing, calming, have a limited color palette. I'm not really seeing any like I spy versions like for our wallpapers, bright colors, busy designs, eligible patterns do not typically work. And I don't know if you can tell but there's definitely a reason why there's no warm colors in any of our wallpapers is like an overwhelming because it just wouldn't be in line with Fedora's branding. Their identity is blue and we like to try and stay close to that. When I look at just these sections or this section of wallpapers, I kind of get a sense from just a glance of what program was used for each one. You've got Fedora 28 and Fedora 29 that have these really beautiful particle effects. And I'm like, that's giving blender. But then like Fedora 32 has a very kind of graphic look and I was like maybe it was done in Blender but maybe it was done in a different program. But because all of the wallpapers are documented so thoroughly as is the open source way, I was able to go back into the org for Fedora design and confirm that it was indeed Blender. And so I think that if you guys ever just super bored you wanna play a guessing game, definitely try and get a sense of what program was used for these and maybe go look back at the old tickets because I think it's super fun. But we're not here to talk about all those other wallpapers. We're talking about which wallpapers use Krita here. So I can 100% confirm and it's not because I was probably the main person working on them in the majority of these wallpapers but 100% Fedora 33, 34, 36, 37 and 38 which has not been released yet but is in the process have all used Krita with varying degrees for the final wallpaper. I didn't work on Fedora 34 which is in the upper right-hand corner as actively as the others. So I won't be able to offer as much insight. Luckily when I'm working on a wallpaper I'm able to take a lot of screenshots. I'm able to have the file directly on my computer and obviously I would be able to go back in to the old tickets and download the Fedora 34 files since it's all documented so well on Paguar. It's just a bit easier to talk about what you really actually worked on yourself. So but I would definitely recommend it because Kate Rosmova and Mo Duffy, Marie Norton, a lot of familiar faces and other team members that a really great job on that release. And I think it's just another great showcase of the potential that Krita has. So, because I mean between the four of these there's kind of a really wide variety of how you can achieve a final wallpaper. But Fedora 33 wallpaper was my first experience with Krita and the Fedora Desiring Team which Mo kind of brought up at the beginning when she introduced me but this was back in the summer of 2020. And before I talk about that I'm gonna talk about how the inspiration just very briefly for the wallpapers are chosen. You may or may not know but they are all inspired by a STEM person in history and each release corresponds with the letter on the alphabet. The 33rd letter is H. So several scientists, inventors and engineers with last names that start with H were voted on and Walter Lincoln-Honkins was chose to be Fedora 33's inspiration. And so the idea was that since his invention helped give rural areas access to the telephone that the earth could be shown lit up with all the telephone poles and communication that came from it. The idea being that the earth could be rendered in blender but the space design could be painted digitally which was perfect for Krita. And so we've mentioned it several times but it's only because we want you guys to be, you feel welcome and encouraged to join the design team but we meet every week for a half an hour to 45 minutes. You can come in and out. You don't have to stay for the whole thing. We have a live stream link where you can just observe if you're a little nervous or a participation link but I was the newbie back in the summer of 2020. I had only been working with Fedora for about two months day to day. I was working with Inkscape and I had no experience with Krita. I knew what it was but that was kind of it. So I attended the meetings and despite my limited, oh, got too excited there with the mouse scrolling. I attended the meetings and despite my limited experience I decided to play around in the program and just try and see what I could get created. And this is what I came up with on the screen here right now. I just remember sitting in the evening and having so much fun just playing with the digital brushes which I think is what really draws people to Krita, especially if you've ever worked with any other digital painting programs. This is one for you. So this is the final Fedora 33 wallpaper. So we have a daytime version or I believe it was dawn, a daytime version, dusk and night. So four versions that would change throughout the time of day both based on your location's time zone. But yeah, it was just so cool to be a part of this when I was really such a new member. And I think that's the beauty of the design team and projects like the Fedora wallpaper. It's that these pieces of art are the best when they're a team effort. You have the Earth render by Kyle Conway, the Krita background from myself to the color tweaking in Gimp by Moe as well as a lot of feedback sessions and help from multiple design team members. This wallpaper, it's definitely not a one-person job. So even if you've never touched the program before you might be able to come up with just the right something necessary. So if this seems like something you'd be interested in contributing when going that's Nudge, we'd love to welcome you at the next design team meeting. All right, and onto the Fedora 36 wallpaper where Krita and Blender merge yet again but in a little bit of a different way. So Fedora 36, you may be familiar with it. This is the final day version which is created in Blender. However, you may or may not be familiar with the beta release. So back when we were coming up with the brainstorming for this wallpaper we were talking about the layers of art, the layers of glass, talking about nature, movement. These were all themes that we had discussed that reflected the person that we had chosen to inspire the wallpaper. And so I thought that we sometimes, and this can happen in the case of website development as well, you have people who create the mock-up for the page and then you have the people who look at the mock-up and then they build it based off of that kind of like how an architecture creates the floor plans to a building and then someone actually builds them. So I was basically making the mock-up in Krita digitally painting which I created the day, the sunset and the moon slash night version. But it just goes to show, I mean I showed you the final version, very similar but wouldn't have probably been able to get a render like that without the combination of both of our skills. So maybe what you have in Blender can be merged with something in Krita. We'll never know. Fedora 37 was an entirely Krita wallpaper. And so this is gonna be where I start talking about like brushes and actual things in Krita that I think are really cool and helpful to play around with. So this is the thumbnail that I created for the wallpaper. I created the sketch with like one brush, just different sizes, various capacities. And I really liked this, the composition I thought was pretty top notch. I think the only thing I ended up changing was maybe one of the buildings in the front because it was kind of making the piece unbalanced. But I decided to paint directly on top of it to keep that loose quality because I really wanted it to not feel stiff. And so here you have the, not the thumbnail, but like the midway checkpoint for the daytime and the nighttime version. So, and right here I have the list of kind of steps that we went through. We had the sketch and then the color study. Color study is super important because it gets the vibe. Like I kind of talked about this earlier with Fedora wallpapers. You want it to be calm. You want it to be leaning towards cooler colors. And it's just so important to not go full steam ahead from beginning to end on your computer without getting any feedback from anyone else on the team because there might be something really big that you're not noticing because you're like on lock. So it's just super helpful to get those feedback, feedback, feedback. So with the night file, what I do is once I have a particularly good setup for the day, I will just duplicate the file and then change the colors and kind of add things as I need to. So like the night version had the satellites going through the sky and obviously change the colors. But sometimes that's as easy as just applying a masking layer and making it just bluer. But yeah, I was really happy with how these were starting to shape up. So this is still I think the midway checkpoint. And then you can see how with a little bit of rendering, it kind of goes from to final. And it's not always super noticeable, but going back, you have those kind of sketchy lines that are then kind of smoothed over. You have the light streaming in. And this just required a lot of layers, which I'll talk about, a layer for the lights, a layer for the clouds. So everything can be moved if I need to. But, and then we have the night version and there's a layer for that too, where like if I wanna have the glow around those satellites, I wanna make sure that if I need to move it because we've decided that the building needs to be shifted to the left to make the wallpaper feel more distributed and equal, I wanna make sure that that isn't gonna, I'm not gonna have to like carve a trunk out of the painting, which is probably what like Leonardo DaVinci would have had to do if they're like, actually what if her non-existent smile needs to be moved one inch over. He's like, well, I'm either gonna have to paint all of it over again or, and they're like, yeah. So luckily this means I don't have to. And at the bottom, you'll see my two favorite brushes for this piece. And it just goes to show that you do not need to be particularly good at like rendering or having a huge tool belt. Like sometimes it's just best to have simple tools and you can kind of experiment with the size, the opacity. And sometimes just the color too. So yeah, that was super fun. And now I'll show you the Fedora 30 wallpaper in progress. All right, so as I mentioned, layers are the blueprint for any piece. And I recommend labeling all of them and trying to stay on top of it from the beginning. So as you can see, it's super easy to create a sketch in Krita. And from there you can start to section pieces into groups. So for this, I was like, okay, we've got different kind of very clear layers of clouds. One thing that we were thinking about was for the final release was to potentially take what we have in Krita and take it into Blender and kind of like glass frames for old school animation. You set it up or like a tunnel book. So you could peer through it and you could kind of shift it a little bit and have a little bit more depth than just the 2D illustration in Krita. So that's why I was like, I think it's really important that we have multiple layers that kind of frame the piece as you zoom into the ground with the city and lights. So you can see, I add the background and then the farthest back cloud. And then I block some more in and again and again. So the cloud gets a layer and then the next, next and on the side, I have a screenshot of how my layers, each layer of the clouds is actually a group layer. And then within the mini screenshot, you can see that two of my group layers open up and what they look like in there. So right now, if you look at what I have so far, they're pretty flat. They're kind of smooth on the edges, but they weren't that way originally. I was just using my favorite brush from before to kind of block in the shapes and do flat colors in grayscale. Just so I can figure out the composition and the hierarchy. And then once the flat lays are created, I go back and control shift G to make a clipping group so I can have a mask layer. And you might be familiar with the mask layer. Personally, I love them. I think they're great. A mask layer just keeps anything you add only within the area that the layer underneath it, the initial layer has something. So if you're trying to draw outside of it, or if you're trying to draw on the background cloud while you're on the foreground clouds mask layer, nothing's gonna show up unless you go back on to where the foreground cloud was. It's kind of like a really perfect piece of tape, keeping everything within the area section off. And so I then go back, I start to add some haze, add some stars, and then go back into the grid I had in my sketch and kind of playing out some of the city lights. And then this is where I go into the mask layer and I start to add textures with a texture brush and kind of give it that dimension and also some shadows with masking layers again and again and again, just to see how it works. You can just really muck about. These are kind of the only brushes that I used for this work. As I mentioned, this shows how harsh the lines were on the sides before I blended them out. And I also was able to send this in for feedback in the design chat and someone suggested that the clouds seem a little bright, maybe tone them down a bit, which I did. And it was a really great piece of advice. So then they turned out like this. And this is going to be the beta wallpaper release. I'm slowly getting to the end of this presentation, but it's interesting because Fedora 36 and 37, a lot of clouds are involved and Fedora 38, it's like, I don't know, are these clouds following me through my work? But I think that there's some of the hardest things to depict. I've been looking at a lot of studio jibblies seeing how they paint them. And I think nature in general, it's how far should you simplify something and where to add detail so that it doesn't get too busy. But lowering, like I keep saying this, but one of my favorite things is just kind of lowering the opacity and transparency of your brush and kind of seeing how your scribbles really layer on top of each other. And I mean, I kind of compiled some of the clouds here compared to, I mean, they just billow. And I think it's just gonna be really exciting to see how we can take that in this wallpaper. But yeah, so maybe my next step will be exploring all the talks on Blender at the conference and seeing what I can learn from there and how to take these skills in Krita and go into Blender. But yeah, that is the end of my presentation. And that is all I have. Are you ready for questions, Madeline? I am ready for questions. Okay, so the first one is, any tips on improving your skills in Krita? Do you have a favorite channel or tutorials that you like? I don't have a favorite channel, but I actually was on YouTube looking up videos when I was making this presentation because I wanted to see what was out there. I think that there's quite a few that have a lot of potential that I kind of was getting sucked into. I think that just deciding to draw something and we talk about this a lot in the design team where if you just are passionate about something like I'm really obsessed with Miffy right now or I'm obsessed with Breath of the Wild and Legend of Zelda. So if you go into the Krita website, they have beautiful renderings and examples of how artists on their team have created things in Krita. And so I think I would just find something I was passionate about and try and see what I could create in Krita. Because from there, it'll force you to kind of experiment with brushes. You'll be interested in enough so that you won't stop when it gets hard. So yeah, I would just say chase the passion and be curious. Okay, great. So the next question is, can you explain what a clipping group is? Right, so, all right. So if you see, so I have group one, if I hit that tab folder, everything in it will collapse, kind of like you're closing your folder. And then you have foreground clouds, which is also its own folder. If I click on that tab, it then shows in my next screenshot what's in it. And so a clipping group is just kind of what I talked about where your mask, people use them interchangeably, like a mask layer or a clipping layer, but it's just so that like, you can only draw where the original layer is. And so actually, if you look at that screenshot, within foreground clouds where the folder is open, I have the bottom most layer one foreground clouds, it kind of trails off. And then the layers above it, paint layer nine, mask layer, within the icons, there's like the lock tab and the A on the right of them. They both have the A checked, which symbolizes that it's a mask layer and that those two layers are like, kind of locked onto the layer at the bottom so that you can't draw off of that original layer, if that makes sense. I would definitely Google it if you're still confused, but it's super helpful. It's kind of like, I don't know, masking tape. Okay, great. So we had three more so far anyway. So the next one is great presentation. I wanted to ask which Fedora wallpaper was the hardest or most time-consuming to finish? I mean, as far as what I worked on, I'm sure Marie and Mo, you have your own opinions on which ones were the hardest. But I mean, I can kind of like look back at them to get a better, I would probably say that the door 37 was kind of time-consuming just because we were going in one direction and then we changed it, but ultimately it was for the better. I think that when I look at the ticket for Fedora 34, there was a lot of iterations for that one as well. Just like minor tweaks. So I guess my answer is Fedora 37. The question is, since there's inspirations on each wallpaper, should the Fedora marketing team market that in some way, maybe by doing a guessing game with the community and users and social media? Oh, I don't think we've ever had that idea before. Yeah, it's kind of a cool one actually. I like that I talk about that. I mean, we've definitely been getting a lot closer with the Fedora marketing team just even in the past release. So I think that it'll be like two superhero teams teaming up. Definitely. Okay, one last question. This is a gear question. Do you have recommendations for drawing tablets? Yes, I do. But I'm also really lucky because I've had this one for a long time like I invested in it. But this is the Intuos Wacom size medium. Yeah, pro medium. And I've had this for probably eight years. But I was also able to find a size small on Facebook marketplace for $30. So like it's definitely possible. And I think it's really great because you're able to program the buttons on the side to be your undo buttons or zoom in, redo, yada, yada. So thank you guys for the really great questions. And thank you guys for being my moderator. It was great to be here. Awesome, thank you so much. It was a great talk. You have lots of great positive feedback in the chat. Sweet, thank you guys. And I'm excited for the next talk. So I'll let you guys go. Bye.