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

Refining our painting

Since we now have our planes in their own groups, our painting session will speed up considerably and allow for some great editing and tweaking while retaining our specific image planes. Let's refine our image's background:

  1. On the Layers panel, click the left-most eyeball icon (the visibility icon) next to the Foreground and Midground groups. This will hide these groups in their entirety, so anything within the folders of the group will be hidden as well.
  2. Click on the Background group and click the arrow underneath the tiny folder icon to "maximize" the group, showing us our Background Plane layer. Your Layers panel should look as in Figure 3.25 at this point:

Figure 3.25 – The Background group is active, while Midground and Foreground are hidden

  1. Make sure the Background Plane layer is selected.
  2. Click the plus icon (+) on the bottom left of the toolbar to create a new Paint Layer 1 above...