About Krita
Krita is digital painting software carried by the Krita Foundation together with a community of developers and artists. It gathers customizable brushes, layers, drawing assistants and selection tools in an environment meant to build an image through the strokes. In it you can prepare an illustration, a comic page or a color study. This category application ships with an installer and a portable archive for Windows. The official version downloaded from the project website is free and open source.
All its appeal comes from the room left to drawing: the behavior of the brush, the organization of presets and the interplay with a tablet take up a central part of the work. The animation functions open up, besides, the creation of frame-by-frame drawn sequences. A start with the mouse stays possible, but a compatible stylus offers more natural control of pressure. The KRA format keeps the document and its layers for the sessions that follow. Images meant for publication, by contrast, are exported separately. For those who mainly retouch photographs or quickly assemble visuals, other tools in the catalog may fit the intended everyday gestures better.
Keep a few brushes in tune with your stroke
The number of presets on offer does not have to decide your first session. Keep one brush for sketching, another for flat areas and a third for color transitions. Try out the pressure and the size on a small canvas before you start your illustration. You will thus tell apart the reactions that come from the brush from those that hinge on the stylus. Store your useful presets in one easy-to-find set. A small, well-mastered personal library can make work steadier than a collection of brushes whose behavior you discover right in the middle of an image already well along.
Set lines, colors and corrections aside from one another
A sound organization of layers lets you rework part of the illustration without touching the rest. Place the sketch, the inking and the colors in separate groups, for instance. Name the elements after their content and save your project in KRA. Before a sweeping transformation, keep a copy of the layer or a version of the document. Masks and blending modes then come in to change the look of an area. Check the image regularly at its intended size: a texture pleasing in close-up can fade on a thumbnail, while too little contrast can make the composition hard to read.
Lean on the assistants for regular shapes
Drawing assistants help you work out perspectives and run along guide shapes. They render service for a room, a vehicle or a backdrop whose several lines must stay coherent. Set up these markers before the details, then set their orientation against the main volumes of your composition. Stroke stabilizers cover another need: they can make the gesture more controlled, with a response that varies with the setting. Give yourself the time to compare a free stroke and an assisted stroke. A setting comfortable for inking may turn less pleasant during a quick sketch or a search for shapes.
Build a short drawn animation
Krita provides a timeline for arranging keyframes and an onion skin for seeing the neighboring positions. Start with a short, lightly detailed loop, so as to check the rhythm before adding the colors. Multiplying images and layers drives memory needs upward. Keep a resolution tuned to your test and save the document regularly. Exporting an animation calls for choosing a format and, depending on the method, compatible encoding components. A run of images can also serve as an intermediate step toward editing software. Inspect the exported result to check its duration and real pace.
Check the tablet before a long-running project
The download page points to compatibility with the tablets the system supports, but the driver and its settings remain decisive. Try out the pressure, the cursor positioning and the stylus buttons on your computer. If several screens are connected, make sure the active surface matches the one where you draw. Large brushes and heavily worked canvases may call for more resources than simple strokes. Lower the brush size for a moment to pin down the source of a slowdown. The project states four gigabytes of memory as a minimum and recommends sixteen gigabytes to work with more comfortable headroom.
Weigh painting, retouching and simple assembly
GIMP may suit better an activity dominated by selections, cutouts and photographic retouching. Paint.NET offers another approach for simpler corrections and compositions on Windows. Adobe Photoshop has its own commercial painting and retouching package. Your choice depends on the final document and the tools you really use. To compare, draw a small study, take up its colors and export the result in each environment. If you exchange PSD files, check the elements after import: the presence of this format does not guarantee a complete match between the functions of several editors.
Key features
- Customizable brushes to vary your painting gestures
- Layers and groups to structure an illustration
- Drawing assistants to work out perspectives
- Line stabilization following the artist's habits
- Drawn animation featuring a timeline and onion skin
- KRA format that preserves the working document
System requirements
Windows 8.1 or later, 64-bit; 4 GB RAM minimum, 16 GB recommended; OpenGL 3.0 or Direct3D 11; disk space not specified.
How to install
- Download the stable Windows installer from the Krita site.
- Run the file and accept the distribution terms.
- Choose the proposed folder and components, then complete the installation.
- Open Krita and test your pen on an empty canvas.
