If you are a creative person, who is good at drawing both as a hobby and for professional reasons, surely you have also considered doing it digitally with the help of a computer and a tablet. In this case, you should know that there are applications that offer all kinds of tools with which to achieve spectacular results, obtaining an experience similar to that of traditional drawing. For this reason, today we are going to talk about Krita , a professional program with which you can capture any idea that comes to mind.
What is Krita and what is it for?
Krita is a free, open source, multiplatform, professional digital painting program. It has been designed to offer all kinds of accessible tools so that conceptual art artists, matte painting and texture artists and illustrators can develop their full potential. It is a tremendously versatile application so we can also use it as a vector image editor and photo retouching tool.
This program has been developed for more than 10 years, growing rapidly in recent years, offering all kinds of common and innovative functions to help all kinds of users to make their creations, be they beginners or professionals.
The application offers us a large number of brushes and effects, which will offer us the possibility of working comfortably and efficiently with several layers. It includes support for most of the most popular and used image formats, as well as sections for palette management, retouching, cropping and vector modification.
Navigating and using Krita
User interface
The Krita User Interface is one of its strengths as it is extremely intuitive. It has a way of working similar to that we can find in other programs such as Photoshop or Corel Painter, since we will have filters, layers, blending modes, brushes to warp and all kinds of possibilities. It is also possible to modify the keyboard shortcuts, so that we can adapt it to the tools that we use most frequently.
In the interface we will find panels that we can move and customize to our liking so that they can be adapted to our work, and 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
Brushes are the essential 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 in order to recognize them. We will find different brushes and drawing tools, with the ink tool being the recommended one for drawing. With Krita, we will have the possibility to import brushes and textures packages from other users to increase our number of available tools.
Each brush has stabilizers that will allow more smoothing in the line, being able to configure up to 3 different ways to smooth and stabilize our lines. We will also have a Dynamic Brush with which we will get cleaner lines and greater precision, as well as a Wrapping Mode that will allow us to easily create perfect textures.
Pop-up palette
Krita has a powerful pop-up color palette that we can activate by right-clicking. From here, we can quickly choose any color and brush that we need. On the outside of the palette we will have the color picker that contains the colors that we have used most recently. With the Krita labeling system we can exchange 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 the layers so that we can organize our drawings, being able to combine and group drawings. It also allows us to remove parts of a drawing, using the layer visibility option.
Download Krita
Krita is a completely free application that we can download directly from its website . It is a multi-system program, making it 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 in order to be able to compare between them, here we leave you other options that we can use to draw and make illustrations:
SketchBook Pro : This is a professional application for digital drawing belonging to 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.
Paint – is a free, open source drawing and editing program that provides users with a powerful but easy way to draw and manipulate images. It can be downloaded from here , and it is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS operating systems.
PaintTool SAI : it is a 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 buy the license for life for about $ 51.
MediaBang Paint : is an application aimed at illustration and creation of comics, compatible with Windows and Mac OS operating systems, as well as mobile devices with Android and iOS. We can download it completely free of charge from here .
