Sadhana Tracker/Habit Tracker in ‘Speedy Painter’ [pixel-art style]
Around two weeks ago I have started to use ‘Speedy Painter’ freeware software as a habit tracker [https://speedypainter.altervista.org].
‘Speedy Painter’ is a typical art software akin to Krita, MyPaint, ArtRage and similar stuff, but its OpenGL engine turns it into incredibly fast paint workshop.
The habit tracker built on ‘Speedy Painter’ works in the very plain way: you just load some png/jpeg template in it and fill the template using ‘bucket fill’/’colour picker’ tools with a certain colour combo. For my money, this system is much better than umpteen habit trackers for smartphones with their minuscule and tiny screens.
So, step-by-step creation:
Step 01 — Template. The very basic template will come in handy as a launching pad: in images.google.com or pinterest.com or bing.com/images/search the templates of this kind can be found via such requests as ‘habit tracker printable’ or ‘habit tracker template’.
I will use the following template further with my own modifications (I have cropped out its upper part and added pixel font ‘jane_tm’ with ‘tropical summer’ colour combo — see the step 3) — #link to jpeg-dummy from papertraildesign.com
Step 02 — Colour Combo. Currently I am following to the ‘5 times per day’ system of worshipping Shreemati MahaLakshmi-Devi and Bhagavan Shree Vishnu’s Avataras, so I need a colour combo consisting of 5 colours.
You can find the combos of this kind on Adobe Kuler [https://color.adobe.com/ru/explore] or on ColorMind [http://colormind.io].
If you need very massive colour combos, then you can also check FlatUI [https://flatuicolors.com].
Pinterest also has a lot of colour combos — I recommend to zap through it with such requests as ‘colour trends’, ‘pastel colours’, ‘vivid color palette’ and etc.
Step 03 — Layers. It’s time to combine the template and colour combo. I usually make this step in GIMP (or Pinta or LazPaint or PhotoDemon).
Why not in ‘Speedy Painter’ itself? The current ‘Speedy Painter’ (version 3.6.4) has the very poor implemented layers’ system, so it’s much better to use Gimp/Pinta/LazPaint/PhotoDemon instead.
Besides, on this level I usually make some additional layer’s operations — trim it, increase/decrease saturation and etc. So, as you can see above I have attached the screenshot of ‘tropical summer’ colour combo to the template.
Step 04 — Captions for each line. I will use a random example further — let’s presume, that we have a person who worships Shreemati MahaLakshmi-Devi in the morning, then Shree Kurma-Avatara in brunch-time, then Shree RajaGopala at noon, Shree Venkateshwara at five o’clock and Shreemati MahaLakshmi-Devi in the evening.
So, now I am creating captions for the above-mentioned 5 kinds of worship. I usually create captions in Fotor, because they have marvellous and freeware Windows 10 client [https://www.fotor.com/windows/index.html] or via web-version of Befunky [https://www.befunky.com/create/].
OK, 5 captions embedded, I have used Fotor in Windows 10, «jane_tm» pixel font with shadows added also via Fotor (Fotor has very lovely «add shadow to font» option) — please see the above screenshot with multi-coloured inscriptions.
Now the template is completely ready for filling in, I save it as ‘*.png-file’ in Fotor and shift to ‘Speedy Painter’.
Step 05 — Speedy Painter. Everything is very simple here: I just drag-and-drop my ready png-template into ‘Speedy Painter’ and fill it in via ‘colour picker’ and ‘bucket fill’ — see the screenshot above or on #plurk.
A possible problem [tolerance settings]: ‘Bucket fill’ tool can leave a square in the template not fully-drawn, but this problem can be tackled easily via tuning the ‘tolerance’ (in ‘Speedy Painter’ it can be found in the very bottom), see the white dotted arrow on the screenshot above.
Step 06 — Backup. I usually re-save this habit tracker in png-format after each filling in. The saved png-files go directly to my cloud storage with instant net backup — in Russia we often use Yandex-Disk or Mail.ru Cloud, in non-Russian countries you can use something like Dropbox with their Windows-10 client (but from my experience I can tell you, that Dropbox has the crappiest software I have ever met).
If you don’t like the cloud backup idea, then I recommend to use «FreeFileSync» (freeware, works perfect on Windows 10 — https://freefilesync.org/) or «Lucky Backup» (for Linux systems).
In any case, after the annual habit tracker filling in you will get 12 png-files which would be interesting to look through at the end of the year in order to realize the direction of your sadhana and etc.
Vishnudut1926,
Moscow, Russia, February-2020
https://vishnudut.wordpress.com/e-library/