I usually don’t do art but since I’ve gone to college I’ve been embracing my creative side more. As this had been happening I was also looking at FOSS digital art and/or design programs as the industry standard Adobe products cost an arm and a leg for each program. I came across the standard FOSS tools usually mentioned such as GIMP as a Photoshop replacement and Inkscape as a Illustrator replacement but I also came across Krita, which is an open source digital painting program. From what I’ve gathered many industry standard artists use Photoshop’s brushes or other proprietary software for digital drawing. However there are many professional artists that use Krita to make stunning art pieces. In fact, a popular webcomic Pepper & Carrot is created primarily using Krita by a French artist David Revoy. His comic is phenomenal and is deserving of it’s own post (which I will link to when it’s created), but here it is a good representation of the potential of what is possible with Krita.

Krita, like many drawing programs, really needs a drawing tablet. Unfortunately, these cost money. Before buying a tablet for Krita, you probably want to check out the list of supported tablets. If you already have one it’s probably supported, Krita seems to be pretty good about that. I personally have a Wacom Intuos Draw, I played with the software that came with it but I found Krita much more powerful.

Krita takes a bit of time to learn, but it’s interface is at least somewhat intuitive. The Krita community provides a lot of documentation for Krita’s features and also includes a lot of tutorials. They also link to external tutorials and links to various resources such as brush packs. Although slightly outdated now, the tutorial I used to learn the basics of Krita was the “Learn Krita with Bob Ross” series by the channel Age of Asparagus on YouTube. It was really fun to be able to learn how to use Krita while re-creating a Bob Ross painting. As a side note if you have heard of or have seen Bob Ross in action, his entire collection of “The Joy of Painting” video series is up for free on YouTube, watching him create a painting is like calming magic, I highly recommend giving it a watch on a boring or frustrating day.

Krita offers quite a few features. It has the standard layers that most graphic programs have. Krita does come with a preset of basic brushes which can be used as a base to make your own brushes customized to your artistic needs. I find that the brush generator is very intuitive and is helpful in letting you try out the brush as you adjust it. Krita integrates well with the programmable buttons on many drawing tablets and pens. It has a quick pop-up pallet that has the brush set you are currently using. You can tag your own brushes to create your own set and be able to see them among other brushes. It’s also very easy to export and import brushes. David Reevoy has his own set of brushes that are very popular and I find very useful. I’ve personally used Krita to help create a mottled background for wallpaper for TigerOS, a Fedora remix aimed at RIT students. I used one of Reevoy’s brushes to make it. Overall I consider a great tool that is definitely worth checking out for digital artists.