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

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Krita

As we have established, the goal of this book is not to be a technical manual about Krita (as Krita's official documentation is way better at that than I will ever be!). However, there are some fundamentals that we are going to cover to make sure we start our Krita journey in the best possible way. Whether you're a seasoned professional or someone who is brand new to digital art, you're certain to find something interesting here!

This chapter is going to cover some of my basic hardware recommendations so that you can get the most out of your Krita painting experience. We will look at a quick overview of Krita as a piece of software, learn how to download and install Krita, and go over Krita's default user interface (UI) once you have the software installed.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Recommending hardware – tablets and upgrades
  • What is Krita, and what makes it different?
  • Installing Krita
  • Breaking down the Krita UI