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 2: Reviewing Canvas Properties and Color

Welcome to the second chapter! In the previous chapter, we discussed what makes Krita unique, installed the software, and discovered some fun ways to customize your user interface (UI) to make sure you have everything you need to get creating.

This chapter will be discussing a few things that seem to be "gotcha" topics for a sizeable portion of digital artists, even at intermediate and advanced levels. My goal for this book is to be a reference that acts as your "art buddy"—something you can take off the shelf year after year and find something new to chew on. No chapter will encapsulate this more so than this one.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Breaking down resolution, aspect ratios, canvases, and dots per inch (DPI)/pixels per inch (PPI)
  • Evaluating color modes—red, green, blue (RGB), cyan, magenta, yellow, and blacK (CMYK), and the RGB/RYB difference (additive...