The store might have gone live and been classed amongst the "Early Access Games" on April 1st, but it was no joke!

Krita Gemini store-page

The version currently available comes with the 2-in-1 interfaces, some basic cloud support for brushes, Steam auto-updates and also our gratitude!
Enthusiastic early-adopters can also choose the "Beta" to get the very latest for-testing version before the stable branch is updated. This way they will see the software improve in readiness for the main release in May.

Other Windows users might want to take advantage of the improved features and bug-fixes in Krita Desktop 2.8.1[www.kritastudio.com] which landed on Friday.

Just to let folks know that the third art challenge is with the theme "Games" and the deadline is Monday 17th March, so a bit longer than before - the plan being to eventually move to one every 2 weeks.

Art Challenge #3 "Games"

Additionally, I've started taking votes for the Dragon art challenge - I think it's best to keep this private between myself and the voter, and I've left some notes on how to do this. I'll happily take votes from anyone, but will check whether the participants would be happy with this subtle change in the rules (well, they're more guidelines...)

List of entries and voting for Art Challenge #2 "Can you draw a dragon?"

Please let me know if there's anything you think I could do to improve these challenges, or suggestions for new themes.

I've seen some really nice work coming in recently for this project, but I know someone who had been showing WIP ran into a CATastrophic file corruption error (though who, thankfully was able to recover it).

As a result, I've decided to extend the deadline and remind folks "hey, draw a dragon now , more dragons would be cool" ;)

"Can you draw a dragon?" Art Challenge

Counted the votes in from the participants, and I'm happy to announce that the entry with the most votes from last week's "Show Krita Your Love" challenge was:

Kiki - Krit'a's mascot[www.weasyl.com] by Pomke!
Congratulations, you're "Player of the Week"!

There were 4 other entries before the deadline and one who showed up just after we started taking votes.

Eo was the first to submit KRITA HAVE ALL MY LOOOOOVE I [dl.dropboxusercontent.com], barely a day after it had been announced! This started a trend, and all but one of the other entries featured Kiki or the Krita logo! :D

Moekonya drew Kiki in the style of MLP[yohawelimbergh.deviantart.com]

BaconCR used Krita and a little of GIMP to do their first piece of digital painting[i.imgur.com]

Yalyn V. drew someone holding a digital pen and a kiki doll[docs.google.com]

My own entry was a sunset on the beach[hoardingshinies.com].

Thanks again to everyone who took part - I really enjoyed seeing everyone's creations, and it was good to get myself drawing again :)

Still labelled as 2.8 beta3, the 2.7.9.12 is pretty close that what we hope to release next Wednesday. Compared to the .11 build, there are the following improvements:

http://heap.kogmbh.net/downloads/krita_x64_2.7.9.12.msi
http://heap.kogmbh.net/downloads/krita_x86_2.7.9.12.msi

The XP package is being built and will be available later on.

* Fix saving compositions (BUG:331310)
* New erase toggle icon
* Fix a memory leak when using the brightness/contrast curve (BUG:330479)
* Save resolution info to OpenRaster files (BUG:321106)
* Make handling custom input profiles more robust, also when updating (this should be the first 2.7.9.x release where you shouldn't need to remove the input settings folder)
* add a reset button to the input profile editor
* Fix wraparound mode for the selection painting tools
* Crop selection masks when activating the wraparound mode (BUG:330372)
* Fix painting the cursor outline when there is no cursor outline (BUG:330570)
* Make painting on high bit depth images much faste when the OpenGL canvas is enabled (BUG:331347)
* Fix updates of the canvas rulers (BUG:330129)
* Fix moving of a selection out of a layer (BUG:324373)
* Fix saving indexed PNG files with current versions of libpng
* Update to the latest G'Mic version and enable the G'Mic plugin on windows
* Make the G'Mic dialog resize when selecting a filter (fixes layout issues)
* Add a crash handler for Windows that uploads minidumps (the website that goes with it is not done yet!) and offers a clean restart

Oh... And the Steam Version is making awesome progress as well... More on that, later.