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

Learning industry-standard paint-over techniques

We are at a place where we are confident with our idea, and it's time to push to the final stage! There are two important steps I do at this point (well, one of them I always do; the other one is optional, but we'll discuss that momentarily):

  • Make a merged copy of our work thus far, create a new file, paste our merged image into it, and then increase the size to what we want our final output's width, height, and resolution to be before we start rendering. This is the step I always do, as I want to make sure every brushstroke and decision I make is going to make it to our final output.
  • Grab a large number of photo references to photobash. This is the "optional" part, so if your project doesn't need or require a photobash, don't feel pressured to do this part. While it's a great way to speed up getting your textures and visual information in your painting, it's not a requirement...