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

Adding edges with selection tools

Usually, when someone makes a comment about a digital image looking "painterly," what they're referring to is the control of edges. Any dynamic painting is going to have a nice mix of edges, and when we do our still-life study later, in Chapter 10, Enforcing Fundamentals, we will do a breakdown of when and where to use which types of edges for maximum impact for your viewer.

In this section of the current chapter, we're going to discuss and use some selection tools to create more solidified shapes and give us the ability to work within the confines we create in order to make dynamic, interesting mountains.

Defining the tools

Let's do a quick breakdown of our selection tools to get a good grasp on which types of problems we can solve.

Have a look at the following screenshot:

Figure 6.9 – Our selection tools via the Toolbox

From left to right in Figure 6.9, we have the following tools...