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

Defining concept art

Before we begin our journey on our final project, I think it's only fair to give a definition of what "concept art" means in the case of this book. In my mind (and professional experience), there are two "types" of concept art:

  • Very rough block-ins for characters, environments, or visualizing key moments of a video game, movie, commercial, or another visual project. This can be as quick as a sketch on a napkin during lunch with a client, or a set of multiple options of an item, person, or location for our client to choose from, such as "mood paintings" (which is what we'll be making) or "turnarounds," where we create a front, rear, and side view of an item or character to assist team members with other specializations in a company or team environment (such as 3D modelers, technical artists, and lighting artists, for example).

Here is an example of a conceptual "mood painting" that I created...