Book Image

Draw and Paint Better with Krita

By : Wesley Gardner
Book Image

Draw and Paint Better with Krita

By: Wesley Gardner

Overview of this book

Krita is a free, open-source digital painting program with industry-leading functionality and a creative suite of tools able to bring any visual idea to life. It allows for a fast, clean approach to creating digital art, without the hassle of pay-to-play or subscription license fees, but just like all other art software, it takes time and effort to learn it. This book provides a comprehensive look into functional tools, visual problem-solving, and leading painting techniques using Krita to unleash your inner artist. You’ll learn the functionality and tools of Krita for creating digital and print-quality work as well as explore manipulation toolsets, custom brush creation, overviews of color spaces, and layer management. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with ‘key styles’ needed to make professional-grade digital art, through techniques such as photobashing, 3D paint-overs, and more traditional painting methods, along with covering how Krita handles these workflows. Next, you’ll work through a few step-by-step art pieces using the skills and tools learned throughout the book. By the end of this Krita book, you’ll have a solid understanding of the Krita work environment and be able to bring your artistic visions to life with a myriad of leading industry-standard techniques.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Intro to Krita and Digital Art Terminology Review
6
Part 2: Methods of Visual Communication within Krita
11
Part 3: Projects Unleashing Your Inner Artist with Krita

Organizing with shape language

Shape language is a term you may have seen floating around various other art, character design, or animation tutorials you may have seen, but what does it mean? While there are many different functional definitions of shape language, in the capacity of this book, shape language can be defined as simplifying complex areas of a painting into basic geometric shapes, giving us the "essence" of what we are trying to communicate to the viewer. Instead of focusing on the main focal points as the item's terminology or definition in the context of the subject matter (for instance, referring to something as a mountain, clouds, a vehicle, or a character), think of basic shapes that make up the silhouette of the subject matter, such as triangles, circles, ovals, rectangles, squares, and diamonds.

This is useful for clarifying our designs and breaking our artwork down into repeatable steps for others (such as an art team). Another usage for the...