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

Setting up grids and guides

There are a variety of methods to transfer an image to a canvas. In the next section, Transferring what you see, we will go through, step by step, getting our shapes and main composition down on the canvas with brushes. Before we get there, we need to make some decisions. This will tie into what your overall goal of the study is, and the aspects you would like to focus on.

For this project, my main goal is to make a strong composition showcasing the differences between the apples and the wooden panels. I would also like to modify the composition slightly, as it will help me work on my imagination skills while basing my decision-making on the foundations that the stock image provides. I will do this by changing the orientation of the study. Instead of doing a landscape orientation to match our stock photo (as the image is wider than it is tall), I want to create a piece in portrait orientation (taller than it is wide).

By changing the orientation,...