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

Keeping things loose

Since concept art usually exists in a pre-production environment on a project, its main purpose is often to inspire the rest of the creative team you're working with. Some of my favorite moments of professional work so far come from being part of the pre-production phase known as the "Blue Sky" phase. The Blue Sky phase is all about ideation, and daydreaming about "how cool would this be" when creating the first batch of art. This allows producers, executives, and other artists to become inspired by possibilities before making design decisions on what to keep or what to remove in the context of designs, mood, and "feel" that the art provides.

When I worked for adidas on their X9000 shoe commercial campaign in 2019, we had some Blue Sky sessions to create some inspiring cyberpunk art using location scouting images pre-approved by the advertising campaign's executive team (Figure 11.17):

Figure 11...