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

Summary

Wow, what didn't we do in this chapter? You started with nothing more than a blank canvas and a few general layout ideas, and ended up with a portfolio-ready piece of concept art, completely from your imagination!

We discussed using our tools and knowledge (namely our ideas of perspective, and some layout aids in the form of our Golden Ratio image and our Grid and Guides setup to do a proper Rule of Thirds) to make a strong start. Then, we discussed the power of values and shape language to build a few basic, but visually appealing, thumbnails to compare with one another. After that, we covered the all-important task of looking at our work objectively and learning some skills to help us in making the best choice between images when we are faced with multiple compositional options for a project.

Once we decided on our favorite thumbnail, we made some edits to colors and shapes to find a nice middle ground to keep the best of each of our two thumbnails. Then, we covered...