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

Discussing our reference

While we gave some general guidelines for getting references in Chapter 5, Implementing Layer Blending Modes, in the Finding the right reference and Choosing our reference sections, I thought it'd be interesting to evaluate an image in "real time" to better help us with our project planning.

First of all, let's take a look at our image, titled Three Red Apples on Wooden Surface by Suzy Hazelwood, provided courtesy of Pexels.com (Figure 9.1):

Figure 9.1 – Our reference image, courtesy of Suzy Hazelwood via Pexels.com

In an atelier setting, still-life studies usually consist of a variety of stationary objects (such as vases, skulls, books, flowers, or other odds-and-ends) stacked and situated in a specific way, under specific lighting conditions, for students to draw from life. Students can find seating arrangements and move to get various vantage points of the materials to fully understand how light, shadows...