I actually don't have an art tablet, but I wanted to give this class a go anyway just because I wanted to make some art for a Skillshare class I'm working on about sewing and embroidery.

Had to make some adjustments to technique though. Turns out my passive styluses work on my trackpad so I used that to draw, but I have no pen pressure, so I turned down to opacity a lot more so I could layer where needed. As I practiced, it got easier of course.

Instead of doing the skull and tree, I decided to do some embroidery stitches, so this first image is the very first thing, using the instructions for the skull but applying them to embroider stitches and using a reference for where shadows and such should fall. Did a bit of experimentation with the textures to figure out what would be a good fibrous texture that translates well to thread. Honestly still unsure about which one is best.

To get the shape more refined, I used the airbrush on 50% opacity in eraser mode on my base layer which gave me a softer, more stitch-like shape, but kept the harder edges on most of the ends which I think helps sell the idea that it's disappearing into the fabric because the spots on the ends of my reference pics were much less fuzzy than the main part of the stitch.

 

I designed a title card for my class that requires the same techniques as the tree painting. Since I'm working only with my laptop trackpad and a passive stylus, I sketched this one in my physical sketchbook and inked it for the "final sketch." I did some minor adjustments to make the white part perfectly white and the ink part very dark, uploaded it into a Krita doc, and did some stuff with the transparency mask (see part 3 in this linked article) to get rid of the white so I can use it as my sketch layer.

SKETCH

 

BASE COLORING

 

LOCAL SHADING

Blue is actually part of my color palette I chose for this, so I made the surface behind the fabric that you can see through the holes blue. I might add another tool and make that blue too. Like thread scissors - have all the tools needed for my class shown in the title cards.

FINISHED

 

UPDATE

I utilized the non-destructive techniques to create more art. This is the start of a series of pieces for some visuals for a class I'm working on putting together myself, so I wanted to make sure things are consistent. Since these techniques are non-destructive, I was able to do things like make a copy of the Krita file and delete the layers I don't need for my new piece and not having to re-draw anything that I'm repeating! Mainly that fabric background...

I'm probably going to make a new piece for each of my videos because I like the combo of diagrams and video examples of how things work.

This picture shows all the things I'm going to be teaching in my class: how to do a ladder stitch (used for closing a hole from the outside), a running stitch (for basting things into place before you do your embroidery), a short-and-long stitch, and making a patch.