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

Exploring brushes

Before we get too far down this rabbit hole (and trust me, it's a biiiggg rabbit hole!), let's define what a brush is in context to Krita. Essentially a brush is a collection of customizable settings, mapped to an image (or brush tip), used to lay down visual information onto your canvas via your input device (such as a mouse or tablet). Many brushes exist natively when you first download Krita, and you can also download customized brush packs from various artists who have exported their Krita brush presets (which we will get to in the Exporting our resources section of this chapter).

Brushes have hundreds of settings at their disposal, and mixing and matching these settings can offer up thousands of different brushes with various feels that can mimic traditional pencils, paintbrushes, digital spray paint, and more. Couple these settings with the fact that you can create your own brush tips from scratch, and that number grows to a near-infinite number...