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

Retaining clarity through structure

Since paintings are complex beasts, it's always a good idea to re-simplify and break down our paintings at various points of their creation. Maintaining our sense of clarity, or visual coherence, is key.

So, why did we make the new foreground, midground, and background plane selections? Why make these new alpha-locked layers that essentially already existed in a previous part of our painting exercise? Let's reveal the true power of this technique:

  1. In your Layers panel, select your Midground (Mountains) layer to make it the active layer.
  2. Ctrl-click on the layer's thumbnail (on the left-hand side of the layer's row, next to the hide/reveal eyeball icon) (Figure 8.13):

Figure 8.13 – A close-up of the Midground (Mountains) thumbnail for Ctrl-click selections

Bam! This immediately selected only the contents of the selected layer! Try holding Ctrl and clicking on another layer&apos...