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

Grouping our layers

What we have so far may not feel like a masterpiece, and that's okay! This is a very early stage (one of many "ugly stages" of a painting), mainly used to throw down some ideas and see whether they read well to the eye. For client work, you can expect to do a lot of thumbnailing like this, so it's pretty good practice to work quickly and be organized.

We're going to start grouping our layers, bringing in some more rendering, and performing some deliberate brushwork. Once we get going on this portion, I hope you see the importance of the early steps, as they act as the foundation for the rest of our piece!

Let's set up some layer groups so we can work freely on our background, midground, and foreground, while giving us some flexibility in the type and number of layers we can create for each plane of our landscape:

  1. In the Layers panel, make sure the Background Plane layer is selected.
  2. With the Background Plane layer...