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

Chapter 6: Composing Using Krita's Toolbox

In Chapter 5, Implementing Layer Blending Modes, we took our ongoing landscape painting and integrated some photography and color splashes to further our concept and start the process of refining our piece. In this chapter, we will be using some of Krita's awesome built-in tools to refine our shapes with masks and selections, start finalizing our perspective, and add some impactful brushwork before moving on to the push for final rendering!

The full structure of this chapter will look like this:

  • Masking our layers
  • Adding edges with selection tools
  • Navigating perspective
  • Refining our brushwork

Taking each of these topics one step at a time will allow us to dig into Krita's extensive toolsets, while also working together to refine our piece, preparing it for our final "postprocessing" passes in the next chapter!