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

Controlling mood

Mood, in the context of painting, usually refers to the emotional impact a piece can have on a viewer based on either the feelings expressed in the composition (such as the storytelling or subject matter) or the atmosphere used in the values (lights and darks) and color themes present in the painting.

Now, we can also use the humanized concept of "mood" to discuss this as well, such as "how did this painting make me feel?", which is still a very valid approach. In our instance, however, we'll be focusing on the mechanics of the painting itself, and leave the feelings to the viewer to sort out on their own!

To make this idea a little more tangible, let's first discuss a way we can control the color harmony and "color themes" of a piece in order to elicit a response. While we discussed basic warm-and-cool color theory in Chapter 2, Reviewing Canvas Properties and Color, I'd like to show a cool trick that Krita has in...