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

Choosing our strongest composition

In a perfect world, we would love all our paintings equally. However, I can tell you with absolute certainty, that will never be the case. As your skills develop and take shape, paintings or drawings you may have loved at one point in your hobby or career may end up being outright embarrassing to you months or years later. One of the strongest skills you can develop as a working illustrator or painter is learning when to scrap an idea or be able to objectively see the pros and cons of your work. There is a term called "the artist's curse," which is an idea that states that we will never be able to enjoy our art in the same way we enjoy the art of others. This stems from two primary places:

  • We have been with our artwork since it was a blank canvas, so all we see are the "decisions" we made during the production of the work, instead of the work as a collective whole. We constantly harp on about what we "should have...