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

Applying finishing touches and post-processing

Post-processing can be defined as tweaks that you can make to your image after the fact to further enhance and finalize your image. This can include (but is not limited to) color corrections, level (value) adjustments, light bloom effects, noise filters, and sharpening passes. Let's dig into a few of these, starting with adding some cool light bloom effects.

Creating our light bloom

To add some dramatic flair to our concept design, we can add some cinematic "light bloom" effects, where saturated bright hits of light can be sprinkled about our composition, drawing in our viewers with some fancy contrasts. These are pretty easy to create in Krita and only take a few steps:

  1. Grab a nice airbrush (such as b) Airbrush Soft) and create a new layer. Name this layer Light Blooms and set the blending mode to Color Dodge.
  2. Choose a color, preferably one that matches a background hue (in our case, maybe a red or gray...