电子松鼠琪琪 (Kiki the Cyber Squirrel) 是我为自由开源的绘画软件 Krita 设计的吉祥物。这是琪琪的前期设计，这时候她的名字还没有确定，项目也还没有选定她作为正式的吉祥物，但在 Krita 2.6 的功能介绍手册的封面上使用了这张图。

琪琪之所以是一只松鼠，是因为在社区的讨论中发现“Krita”在阿尔巴尼亚语中的含义是松鼠。当时已经有一些“松鼠画画”主题的吉祥物概念图出现在社区的讨论中了，但它们的样式都偏写实、保守。我的设计则是使用了我在个人作品系列“电子之心”系列中常用的兽人机器人的风格演绎了松鼠的造型，显得更加有科技感，也显得更亲切和符合当代审美。白色的体色反映了画布的默认颜色，耳朵上的花苞代表了画师含苞待放的天赋和灵感。这些核心的设计理念在日后无论经过多少改版都没有太大变化。

这一版设计的琪琪是蓝白配色的，这个配色来自 Krita 的上游项目 KDE 软件框架当时的默认窗口部件主题“Oxygen (轻氧)”。

Krita 是一款自由开源的数字绘画软件。我为它设计了吉祥物“电子松鼠琪琪 (Kiki the Cyber Squirrel)”，并提供了软件、文档、网站的几乎全部中文翻译。

Kiki the Cyber Squirrel is the mascot I designed for Krita, a free and open source digital painting application. This is Kiki’s prototype version. At the time, I didn’t even have a name for her, and Krita had not yet decided her to be their mascot. This version of Kiki was used on Krita 2.6’s feature introduction handbook.

Kiki is a squirrel because the community discovered that “Krita” in Albanian means squirrel. People posted some squirrel based mascot ideas in the forum, but they were mostly realistic squirrels.

In my attempt, I used my typical anthropomorphic, robotic approach, which I think looks technologically advanced and closer to modern aesthetics. Her white base color reflects Krita’s default canvas color. Her bud-like ears stand for budding artists. These core design concepts were largely unchanged in later iterations.

This version of Kiki has a white-blue-black color scheme. It was inspired by Krita’s upstream project KDE’s default window widget theme at the time — “Oxygen”.