Enjoy digital painting and illustration with Krita
If you are a creative person, who knows how to draw both as a hobby and for professional reasons, surely you have also considered doing it digitally using a computer and a tablet. In this case, know that there are applications that offer all kinds of tools to achieve spectacular results, obtaining an experience similar to that of traditional drawing. For this reason, today we are going to talk to you about Chalk , a professional program with which you can capture any idea that crosses your mind.
What is it and what is Krita for
Krita is a program of digital painting professional completely free, open source and cross-platform. It was designed to offer all kinds of tools accessible to conceptual artists, matte and textured artists and illustrators to realize their full potential. It is an extremely versatile app, so we can also use it as a vector image editor and photo editing tool.
This program has been developed for over 10 years, growing rapidly in recent years, offering all kinds of common and innovative functions to help all types of users to achieve their creations, whether they are beginners or professionals.
The application provides us with a large number of brushes and effects, which will give us the opportunity to work comfortably and efficiently with several layers. It supports most of the most popular and used image formats, as well as sections for palette management, retouching, cropping, and vector editing.
Navigate and use Krita
User interface
THE user interface Krita is one of her strengths as she is extremely intuitive. It has a way of working similar to what can be found in other programs such as Photoshop or Corel Painter, since we will have filters, layers, blend modes, warp brushes and all kinds of possibilities. . It is also possible to modify the keyboard shortcuts, in order to be able to adapt it to the tools that we use most frequently.
In the interface we will find some panels that we can move and customize as we please so that they can be adapted to our work, which can be saved as a “workspace”. In this way, it is possible to have several saved interfaces that we can use depending on the work to be done and the tools that we will need.
brushes
The paint brushes are the main tool of any digital drawing application. In Krita we will find a good amount of brushes and brushes. These are designed to perform special and unique functions, so we will always have the right brush for every occasion. All brushes can be modified with a large number of features and we can even change their size.
It also incorporates texture brushes and it will be possible to create our own brushes and label them to be able to recognize them. We will find different brushes and drawing tools, the ink tool being the recommended one for drawing. With Krita, we will have the ability to import brush and texture packages from other users to increase our number of available tools.
Each brush has stabilizers that will allow a greater smoothness in the line, being able to configure up to 3 different ways to smooth and stabilize our trajectories. We will also have a dynamic brush with which we will achieve sharper lines and greater precision, as well as an envelope mode that will allow us to easily create perfect textures.
Contextual palette
Krita has a powerful pop-up color palette which we can activate by clicking with the right mouse button. From there we can quickly choose the color and brush we need. On the outside of the palette, we'll have the color picker which contains the colors we've used most recently. With Krita's labeling system, we can swap out the available brushes that appear on the screen, which we can configure from the Preferences section, at the top.
Layers
Krita will also allow us to manage layers so that we can organize our designs, being able to combine and group the designs. This also allows us to eliminate parts of a drawing, via the option of visibility of layers.
Download Krita
Krita is a fully for free that we can download directly from its Website . It is a multi-system program, therefore it is compatible with Windows, Mac OS and Linux operating systems. In the case of Windows, it also has a Portable version so that we can use it on different devices.
Alternatives to Krita
If we want to look for alternatives to Krita so that we can compare between them, here are some other options we can use to draw and do illustrations:
SketchBook Pro : It's about a professional digital drawing application owned by Autodesk, which can be downloaded for free from this link . It is compatible with Windows and Mac OS operating systems, as well as with Android and iOS mobiles.
Pinta : is a free, open source drawing and editing program, which provides users with a powerful yet simple way to draw and manipulate images. It can be downloaded from here and is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS operating systems.
PaintTool SAI : It is high quality and very light painting software, compatible with digitizers, providing easy and stable operation. You can download a 30 day trial version from their Website . Additionally, we can purchase the lifetime license for around $ 51.
Media Bang Paint : is an application for illustrating and creating comics, compatible with Windows and Mac OS operating systems, as well as mobile devices running Android and iOS. We can download it for free here .
