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

Evaluating reference material

Please allow me a small aside while we start this portion of the chapter, as I want to "shake the cobwebs out" of some pre-conceived notions of reference and its relationship to art. I feel this is important to preface, as this will hopefully clarify the "why" of using reference before we get into the "how."

Destigmatizing reference in art

Reference in art can sometimes be stigmatized. Some artists feel that using reference is "cheating," that if we want to consider ourselves as artists, we should naturally know the visual and molecular properties of every item on Earth (and beyond), at every angle, under every lighting condition ever made, all the time, forever, purely from our mind's eye. That, if it isn't "from imagination," it's not worthwhile art, or the artist who created something based upon information from a reference (whether in person or a photograph) is "a hack.&quot...