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

Splashing in color

Earlier in this chapter, we created our Value Checker layer. While this is extremely helpful when creating our painting to ensure that our lights and darks read well, there's also another hidden benefit to this method: color splashing.

With this technique, you can create a myriad of different color passes for your art, extremely quickly. This is by using a new layer on top of our Value Checker layer, using the Color blending mode. Let's set that up now, and add some nice blues to our painting to set us up for upcoming chapters:

  1. Create a new layer on top of your Value Checker layer, and name this layer Color Splash #1.
  2. Change the blending mode option for the Color Splash #1 layer to Color.

Your Layers panel should look similar to Figure 5.22:

Figure 5.22 – The Color Splash #1 layer, in Color blending mode, on top of the Layer panel stack

  1. With the Color Splash #1 layer active, pick a brush and choose...