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

Masking our layers

A favorite aspect of working in digital art software such as Krita is the ability to work in a non-destructive environment, meaning that you can manipulate visual data on a layer without removing or destroying the actual layer data in the process. A perfect representation of this environment is the use of Masks—a linked add-on connected to a layer that gives the layer information on how it should be presented. There are four main mask types in Krita 5.0, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 6.1 – The four main mask-type options (box highlighted) from the Add Layer menu

Masks are powerful features that have a lot of dynamic power and can be somewhat complex. We will now discuss a quick breakdown of each one of these.

Transparency Mask

Transparency Mask is a way for you to control which portion of a layer is visible, or not visible, to the viewer. This mask uses a "visible" and "non-visible"...