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

Working on your weaknesses – exercises for artistic growth

This section is going to be very short but will cover a few very dense topics that you can study (using either this book, other Packt books, or online resources) to improve your art skills. I will put my top three recommended exercises in bullet-point form, as they're not long or difficult to describe:

  • Draw basic shapes intersecting with other shapes: As I get more and more work in the industry, I'm noticing that the fundamental of "shapes on shapes," or 3D shapes (such as a cube with a sphere or cone on top, in various perspectives) intersecting with one another, makes up at least 85% of the problem-solving in concept art, key art, and marketing art. The following is an example of this:

Figure 13.2 – A mountain painting, focusing on "shapes within shapes" to show light and form

I focused primarily on how different shapes of rock could protrude...