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

Working within our framework

We have a sketched transfer of our subject (Figure 10.1), a high-quality stock photo to work from, and enough digital brushes and features within Krita to give us infinite possibilities:

Figure 10.1 – Our transfer sketch as it appeared at the end of the previous chapter

So, what do we do now? Before digging into our project with paint, it's important to realize there can be some pitfalls when doing direct photo studies like this. Working on every aspect of still-life at the same time is a recipe for disaster, as a few possible outcomes tend to happen:

  • You can hyper-focus on a specific aspect of the piece (such as colors or texture), ignoring the "entire picture" as a standalone piece of art.
  • You can rely too heavily on the stock photo to give you exact information, to such an extent that you don't to deviate from the reference image. So, you could potentially spend dozens of hours on something...