Krita - Free and open source digital painting application for Illustrators, comic artists, concept artists, matte painters etc. Bdo twitch drop event. R/krita is for sharing artworks made in Krita, general help, tips and tricks, troubleshooting etc. Krita - Free and open source digital painting application for Illustrators, comic artists, concept artists, matte painters etc. R/krita is for sharing artworks made in Krita, general help, tips and tricks, troubleshooting etc.
How do I begin painting in Krita? Creating a digital landscape painting might not be as difficult as you would expect. I would even say that being able to draw traditionally isn't that important. Though it definitely helps. I personally know of many great artists that can draw one subject amazingly well but completely fail at other things. I personally find any anatomical stuff extremely challenging.
- Thanks to the 2015 Kickstarter, Krita has animation. In specific, Krita has frame-by-frame raster animation. There's still a lot of elements missing from it, like tweening, but the basic workflow is there. To access the animation features, the easiest way is to change your workspace to Animation.
- Animating With Krita!: How to Download and animate on the free program Krita!
- Made with Krita. Posted by 4 months ago. Made with Krita. Log in or sign up to leave a.
My point is this: if you worry your drawing skills aren't up to scratch don't worry about it. Digital painting uses a unique set of skills which can be practiced by anyone.
Some of the text in this article has been taken from my Photoshop article on digital painting. The technique is exactly the same the only difference is the software.
The Tutorial
If you haven't got it already go download Krita, it's free.
The idea for this tutorial and this technique came from my days at college studying animation. We used to practice a drawing exercise which was fantastic at improving our drawing skills in a short space of time. We would take turns drawing each other in various positions and postures. The catch was we only had thirty seconds to draw each student before moving on to the next drawing.
As you would expect this was very challenging at first because you really struggle to get the drawing right in only 30 seconds. But that is the point. The harsh time limit means you have to work really fast and capture the essence of the subject and not the fine details.
The purpose of the exercise was to simply practice the mechanical act of drawing without planning or thinking things through. This exercise was designed specifically for cell animation which requires the artist to draw the individual frames of an animation.
Working fast (in my opinion) also seems to override the part of the brain which makes you overthink and worry about getting it right. What you end up with is a tonne of rough drawings but you will be surprised how quickly they start getting better and more accurate.
This method is the inspiration behind my speed painting exercise.
What is the exercise? Best dog gps.
Basically, you try your best to recreate a photograph via digital painting. You sample the colours from the original photograph as you go and working quickly you aim to 'roughly' recreate the photo.
You don't need to worry about colour theory or any complicated composition planning. All you have to do is paint.
How Fast? – I think 15 minutes is a good time limit but if you are not yet confident enough working with Krita to work that fast, then really you can try whatever you want. The speed limit is not there to be challenging, the purpose is to get you practising the fundamentals without obsessing over the fine details. (which can be added or refined at any time).
Also if things really go tits up then you have only wasted 15-20 minutes. Of course, the time isn't wasted because you are practising but you don't have to look at a painting you might not like for hours.
Let's get to it.
In Krita
Set Up
Firstly, I am extremely new to Krita myself so this is a learning experience for me too.
Open up Krita and create a new file with any dimensions. There is no real thought behind this I know my end painting won't be amazing so it doesn't need to be big and high resolution.
I am using the default workspace.
Next, open the photo you wish to paint from, Krita will open this up in a new tab. Copy the layer and then change back to the tab which contains our painting canvas.
Paste the copied layer into the canvas, this will likely be way too big so find the transform layer tool. Holding shift (scale in proportion) scale the layer down until it's only a small image and then place it in a corner out of the way.
So that's the canvas set up.
Useful Keyboard Shortcuts:
- CTRL + Click – Sample colours without needing to change from the brush tool
- [ – reduce the brush size
- ] – increase the brush size
Pick a Brush
Use whatever brush you like I personally like the look of hard brushes so that is what I will be using, I make no modifications to the brush.
Before I begin painting I select the most dominant colour in the sky and then using the fill tool I fil the canvas with that colour. This is just a personal preference.
The Painting
So how do I do it?
With the brush tool selected I periodically sample colours from the photograph by pressing CTRL + clicking. I then paint these colours on the layer under the photograph, you can work on one layer it doesn't really matter.
I begin with the background and work towards the foreground, I find this produces cleaner lines and the brush strokes lay over the old strokes.
Don't be reserved, use big fast brush strokes if you like too.
Krita's brush sensitivity is really good so I don't need to change the brush size very often.
I begin with big rough shapes and then as time goes on I start using a smaller brush size to add more detail. The reason I keep the reference photo small is that I don't really care if the composition is perfect. I am more concerned with getting a painting which looks believable and plausible. It doesn't matter if I missed a mountain or one of the hills is the wrong size.
Eventually, you will reach a point where you no longer need to sample the colours from the photo. Your painted canvas will contain all the colours you need.
I delete the photo when I feel like I no longer need it.
You may be surprised by how few colours you actually need.
The way to tell if you are on the right track is to look at your painting from far away or minimize it. If it looks good small it means your composition and colours are correct.
Tips
Try alternating between different zooms. This can affect the smoothness of the brushstroke. If you are zoomed out the brush will move further over the canvas (with the same hand movement).
Observations:
- There are far more colours in the foreground than the background
- Colours in the foreground are darker and more vibrant
- Atmospheric haze means things far away take on the colour of the atmosphere, in this example that would be blue.
- Snow can be incredibly bright
My advice would be, see it through to the end even if you feel like you have made a mistake. The purpose of this exercise is not to produce an amazing painting but to gain experience. You can often correct a lot of mistakes with digital painting especially in the early stages of the painting.
Don't worry about the fine details just try your best to capture the general look of the photograph. The purpose of this exercise is to get a feel for how colours blend together and how the graphics tablet behaves in Krita.
I hope this exercise serves you well, I find this exercise very enjoyable because the composition and palette are already established all I have to do is make some brush strokes.
This article was written as a modification of my Photoshop speed painting article you can view that here: Digital Painting For Beginners: A Simple Exercise
Thanks for reading. Good Luck.
Thanks to the 2015 Kickstarter, Krita has animation. Inspecific, Krita has frame-by-frame raster animation. There's still alot of elements missing from it, like tweening, but the basic workflowis there.
To access the animation features, the easiest way is to change yourworkspace to Animation. This will make the animation dockers andworkflow appear.
Note
New in version 4.1: The Timeline docker looks a bit different from the screenshots shown in this tutorial, however you should be able to follow it if you take care to select options mentioned in text.
Animation curves¶
Auto shutdown macbook. To create an animation curve (currently only for opacity) expand theNew Frame button in the Animation dock and click Add OpacityKeyframe. You can now edit the keyframed value for opacity directly inthe 'Layers' dock, adding more keyframes will by default fade from thelast to the next upcoming keyframe in the timeline over the framesbetween them. See animation curves for details.
Workflow¶
In traditional animation workflow, what you do is that you make keyframes, which contain the important poses, and then draw frames inbetween (tweening in highly sophisticated animator's jargon).
For this workflow, there are three important dockers:
The Timeline Docker. View and control all ofthe frames in your animation. The timeline docker also containsfunctions to manage your layers. The layer that are created in thetimeline docker also appear on the normal Layer docker.
The Animation Docker. This docker contains theplay buttons as well as the ability to change the frame-rate, playback speedand useful little options like auto-key framing.
The Onion Skin Docker. This docker controlsthe look of the onion skin, which in turn is useful for seeing theprevious frame.
Introduction to animation: How to make a walkcycle¶
The best way to get to understand all these different parts is toactually use them. Walk cycles are considered the most basic form of afull animation, because of all the different parts involved with them.Therefore, going over how one makes a walkcycle should serve as a goodintroduction.
Setup¶
First, we make a new file:
On the first tab, we type in a nice ratio like 1280x1024, set the dpi to72 (we're making this for screens after all) and title the document‘walkcycle'.
In the second tab, we choose a nice background color, and set the background to canvas-color. This means that Krita will automatically fill in any transparent bits with the background color. You can change this in Image ‣ Image Properties. This seems to be most useful to people doing animation, as the layer you do animation on MUST be semi-transparent to get onion skinning working.
Note
Krita has a bunch of functionality for meta-data, starting at the Create Document screen. The title will be automatically used as a suggestion for saving and the description can be used by databases, or for you to leave comments behind. Not many people use it individually, but it can be useful for working in larger groups.
Then hit Create!
Then, to get all the necessary tools for animation, select the workspaceswitcher:
And select the animation workspace.
Which should result in this:
The animation workspace adds the timeline, animation and onion skindockers at the bottom.
Animating¶
We have two transparent layers set up. Let's name the bottom one‘environment' and the top ‘walkcycle' by double clicking their names inthe layer docker.
Use the straight line tool to draw a single horizontal line. This isthe ground.
Then, select the ‘walkcycle' layer and draw a head and torso (you can use any brush for this).
Now, selecting a new frame will not make a new frame automatically.Krita doesn't actually see the ‘walkcycle' layer as an animated layer atall!
We can make it animatable by adding a frame to the timeline. a frame inthe timeline to get a context menu. Choose Create Duplicate Frame.
Attention
If you select Create Blank Frame, the content of the layer will be dropped and a new blank frame will appear; since you want to preserve the image, you need to use Create Duplicate Frame.
You can see it has become an animated layer because of the onion skinicon showing up in the timeline docker.
Use the Create Duplicate Frame button to copy the first frame onto the second.Then, use the MoveTool (switch to it using the T shortcut) with the Shift+↑ shortcut to move the frame contents up.
We can see the difference by turning on the onionskinning:
Now, you should see the previous frame as red.
Warning
Krita sees white as a color, not as transparent, so make sure the animation layer you are working on is transparent in the bits where there's no drawing. You can fix the situation by use the Color to Alpha filter, but prevention is best.
Future frames are drawn in green,and both colors can be configured in the onion skin docker.
Now, we're gonna draw the twoextremes of the walkcycle. These are the pose where both legs are as farapart as possible, and the pose where one leg is full stretched and theother pulled in, ready to take the next step.
Now, let's copy these two… We could do that with the Ctrl+dragshortcut, but here comes a tricky bit:
Ctrl+ also selects and deselects frames, so to copy…
Ctrl+ to select all the frames you want to select.
Ctrl+drag. You need to make sure the first frame is ‘orange',otherwise it won't be copied along.
Now then…
Squashed the timeline docker a bit to save space.¶
Art Made With Krita
Copy frame 0 to frame 2.
Copy frame 1 to frame 3.
In the animation docker, set the frame-rate to 4.
Select all frames in the timeline docker by dragging-selecting them.
Press play in the animation docker.
Enjoy your first animation!
Expanding upon your rough walkcycle¶
You can quickly make some space by the Alt+drag shortcut on any frame. This'll move that frame and all others after itin one go.
Then draw inbetweens on each frame that you add.
You'll find that the more frames you add, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of the onion skins.
You can modify the onion skin by using the onion skin docker, where youcan change how many frames are visible at once, by toggling them on thetop row. The bottom row is for controlling transparency, while belowthere you can modify the colors and extremity of the coloring.
Animating with multiple layers¶
Okay, our walkcycle is missing some hands, let's add them on a separatelayer. So we make a new layer, and name it hands and…
Our walkcycle is gone from the timeline docker! This is a featureactually. A full animation can have so many little parts that ananimator might want to remove the layers they're not working on from thetimeline docker. So you manually have to add them.
New in version 4.3.0: In Krita 4.3.0 and later, all new layers are pinned to the timeline by default.
To show a layer whether it's active or not, you can 'pin' it to thetimeline by right-clicking on the layer in the layer docker,and toggling Pin to Timeline. We recommend pinning any layersthat you're currently animating on.
Exporting¶
When you are done, select File ‣ Render Animation. To render to a video file, you'll need a program called FFmpeg. To learn more, please read Render Animation.
Enjoy your walkcycle!
Importing animation frames¶
Made With Kinemaster
In Krita you can import animation frames.
First let us take a sprite sheet from Open Game Art. (This is the LibrePixel Cup male walkcycle).
We'll use Image ‣ Split Image to split up the sprite sheet.
The slices are even, so for a sprite sheet of 9 sprites, use 8 vertical slices and 0 horizontal slices. Give it a proper name and save it as png.
Then, make a new canvas, and select File ‣ Import Animation Frames. This will give you a little window. Select Add images. This should get you a file browser where you can select your images.
You can select multiple images at once.
The frames are currently automaticallyordered. You can set the ordering with the top-left two drop-down boxes.
Indicates at which point the animation should be imported.
Animation Made With Krita
Indicates the difference between the imported animation and thedocument frame rate. This animation is 8 frames big, and the fps ofthe document is 24 frames, so there should be a step of 3 to keep iteven. As you can see, the window gives feedback on how much fps theimported animation would be with the currently given step.
Press OK, and your animation should be imported as a new layer.
Reference¶
