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

Bashing our reference

Now that our landscape painting and our reference images are all open within Krita, it's finally time to start the bashing process! To make our life easier (and also easier for any other artists we might collaborate with), let's go ahead and keep our bashed images within their own layer group:

  1. Make sure your Foreground layer group is active.
  2. Click on the arrow icon on the lower left of the Layers panel and select the Group Layer.
  3. This should create a layer group named Group 4 in between our Value Checker layer and our Foreground layer group (Figure 5.15):

Figure 5.15 – Group 4 created between our Value Checker layer and Foreground layer group

  1. Go ahead and double-click the Group 4 layer group and rename it Photo References.
  2. I want to first put in the photograph we found by Jerry Zhang, so I'll click on the file's tab to make sure that the file is active in my workspace.
  3. With our...