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

Utilizing composition tricks

Composition is a term that has quite a few meanings within visual arts, but two of the most common definitions I've come across are as follows:

  • The placement and/or location of items in a piece of art relative to one another
  • How the "entire piece" works together (think of a composed piece of music, or the way all of the components in a car work together for functionality, for instance)

For this chapter, we will be covering the first definition (dealing with the tangible location of focal points, angles, and shapes on our canvas) of composition. In regard to the second definition, I'm hoping every chapter of the book is helping you piece together your perfect methodology for that! Color, theme, movement, value, edge control, and item placement all combine to make the second definition come to life. That, come to think of it, could be defined as style.

Much like our introduction to various linear perspectives in the...