ETNO: Turkey, Weapon, Kit

Despite a little early talent, I was never THAT good at drawing, because I never really went to school for it or focused on honing the ability. For something like the last decade, the only kind of art I've produced has conformed to a pretty specific style that I've been referring to as "MS Paint Card Art Placeholder."

When making placeholder card art, it was important that no one illustration take very long, hence the limiting tool that is the Microsoft Windows 10 era Paint application; because the tool does not support layers or transparency, I was discouraged from attempting to "perfect" any one aspect of what I was doing.

The linework being crafted by mouse meant a certain shoddiness that I found was complimented or made to "look intentional" by the included crayon brush; this crackly tool comes in but four line weights, further limiting creative options and focusing me on producing quick and dirty color images that were intended to be replaced.

Something happened though.

I guess if you do anything for long enough, even if the doing itself is meant to go "poorly," some sort of refinement process still takes place. I got better with the mouse. I developed techniques for marrying certain edges, for creating abstract backgrounds. It became some sort of style, and out of a sense of comfort I stopped trying to make art outside of it.

Should I even attempt to explain what's going on with this garish depiction of a... children's toy ad? ETNO prompts consist of three random words, so I don't feel particularly responsible for making sense of them.

The rub, the point might be that even if I wanted to "double down" and keep developing this specific style, I'm going to need some better tools; layers, at the very least. A bit of transparency.

I find myself threatening to reinstall Krita and praying to the video card driver gods that nothing starts flickering epileptically again, but even if some sort of custom brush can replace the, uh... vaunted CRAYON TOOL (lol), will something be lost in translation?

I didn't plan for this to look like some print ad; the thing I painted on the background just sort of failed to fill the pre-painted canvas, and rather than cropping it further I simply put SOMETHING in that margin!

Will the ability to freely correct all the bad foresight and planning remove whatever charm originally caused a few people to say, "we need a toggle that lets us play with the original placeholder card art!" and "I'd play a whole game in a janky style like this..."