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

Transferring what you see

We've now entered the next part of the process, where we finally get stuff transferred onto our canvas! Before we get too far into this, we must make a decision that is pretty important: exactly how are we going to transfer this information? There's a topic that I need to bring up right about now, as there's been an intense stigma around this topic for generations.

What could I be referring to? Well, in Chapter 5, Implementing Layer Blending Modes, we discussed the use of references in varying capacities. We even mentioned a little word, a dirty word, that may have captured your attention or caused wide-eyed gasps: tracing.

Tracing isn't cheating

The idea that tracing is "cheating" is an art stigma thing that I have some strong opinions about. In my opinion, to put it simply, tracing is not cheating. Now, this does have some caveats, and they deal with artist intent. Can relying on tracing slow your artistic growth regarding...