- Krita is a program focused mainly on digital painting, although you can also use it to retouch photos or even edit vector images. Initially made for Linux as part of the KDE and included in Calligra Suite, the first stable version for Windows was launched in May 2014 and offers all the power of the previous versions in a Windows environment.
- Krita's main goal is to help artists create a digital painting from scratch. Krita is used by comic artists, matte painters, texture artists, and illustrators around the world. This section explains some common workflow that artists use in Krita. When you open a new document in Krita for the first time, you can start painting instantly.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Krita (/ ˈkriːtə / KREE-tə) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Chrome OS. Krita is one of the best open source software around, and although mistaken by many as a PhotoShop alternative, it is more akin to applications like Painter.It specializes in sketching and drawing and offers tools tuned to those needs, while emphasizing creation over manipulation of graphics. Finally, because Krita is a community-driven project you can also download it for free from the Krita Foundation website. Part of our mission is to create a potent tool for artists everywhere, free from most of the socioeconomic boundaries typically associated with professional art software. If users cannot afford Krita or are still unsure.
Windows¶
Windows users can download Krita from the website, the Windows Store, or Steam.
The versions on the Store and Steam cost money, but are functionally identical to the(free) website version. Unlike the website version, however, both paid versionsget automatic updates when new versions of Krita comes out. After deduction ofthe Store fee, the purchase cost supports Krita development.
The latest version is always on our website.
The page will try to automatically recommend the correct architecture (64- or 32-bit), but you can select 'All Download Versions' to get more choices. To determine your computer architecture manually, go to Settings ‣ About. Your architecture will be listed as the System Type in the Device Specifications section.
Krita by default downloads an installer EXE, but you can also download a portable ZIP file version instead. Unlike the installer version, this portable version does not show previews in Windows Explorer automatically. To get these previews with the portable version, also install Krita's Windows Shell Extension (available on the download page).
These files are also available from the KDE download directory.
For a small fee, you can download Krita from the Windows Store. This version requires Windows 10.
For a small fee, you can also download Krita from Steam.
To download a portable version of Krita go to the KDE download directoryand get the ZIP file instead of the setup.exe installer.
Note
Krita requires Windows 7 or newer. The Store version requires Windows 10.
Linux¶
Many Linux distributions package the latest version of Krita. Sometimesyou will have to enable an extra repository. Krita runs fine under mostdesktop environments such as KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce etc. – even though itis a KDE application and needs the KDE libraries. You might also want toinstall the KDE system settings module and tweak the GUI theme and fonts used,depending on your distributions.
Nautilus/Nemo file extensions¶
Since April 2016, KDE's Dolphin file manager shows KRA and ORA thumbnails bydefault, but Nautilus and its derivatives need an extension. Werecommend Moritz Molch's extensions for XCF, KRA, ORA and PSDthumbnails.
Appimages¶
For Krita 3.0 and later, first try out the appimage from the website.90% of the time this is by far the easiest way to get thelatest Krita. Just download the appimage, and then use the fileproperties or the bash command chmod to make the appimage executable.Double click it, and enjoy Krita. (Or run it in the terminal with./appimagename.appimage)
Open the terminal into the folder you have the appimage.
Make it executable:
Run Krita!
Appimages are ISOs with all the necessary libraries bundled inside, that means nofiddling with repositories and dependencies, at the cost of a slight bitmore disk space taken up (And this size would only be bigger if you wereusing Plasma to begin with).
Ubuntu and Kubuntu¶
It does not matter which version of Ubuntu you use, Krita will run justfine. However, by default, only a very old version of Krita isavailable. You should either use the appimage, flatpak or the snap availablefrom Ubuntu's app store. We also maintain a ppa for getting the latest builds of Krita,you can read more about the ppa and install instructions here.
OpenSUSE¶
Twitch mizkif. The latest stable builds are available from KDE:Extra repo:
Note
Krita is also in the official repos, you can install it from Yast.
Fedora¶
Krita is in the official repos, you can install it by using packagekit (Add/Remove Software) or by writing the following command in terminal.
dnfinstallkrita
You can also use the software center such as gnome software center or Discover to install Krita.
Debian¶
The latest version of Krita available in Debian is 3.1.1.To install Krita type the following line in terminal:
aptinstallkrita
Arch¶
Arch Linux provides krita package in the Extra repository. You caninstall Krita by using the following command:
pacman-Skrita
You can also find Krita pkgbuild in arch user repositories, but it is not guaranteed to contain the latest git version.
Flatpak¶
We also have Flatpak for nightlies and stable builds, these builds are not maintained by the core developers themselves. You can either get the builds from the KDE community website or from the Flathub Maintainers. The KDE community website only offers nightly builds of flatpak.
To install flatpak build from the software center just open the flatpakrepo files with Discover or the software center provided by your distribution:
After adding one of the above repos you can then search for Krita and the software center will show you the flatpak version for installation.
If you prefer doing it from terminal you can use the following commands to install Krita's flatpak build
For KDE Flatpak Repo:
flatpak--userremote-add--if-not-existskdeapps--fromhttps://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo
flatpak--userinstallkdeappsorg.kde.krita-nightly
For installing it from Flathub Repo:
flatpak--userremote-add--if-not-existsflathubhttps://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak--userinstallkdeappsorg.kde.krita
Snaps¶
There are snap packages provided by the Ubuntu snap developers, these are generally not up to date. The Krita Developers do not provide or build the snap packages themselves.To install Krita as a snap package, first install snapd application. Snapd is installed by default on Ubuntu distributions.
If you are on Ubuntu distribution then Krita's snap package may show up in the software center, or you can run the following command in terminal
Note
The Flatpak and Snap builds are not tested by the core developers of Krita, so you may encounter some bugs while running Krita installed from them.
OS X¶
You can download the latest binary from ourwebsite.The binaries work only with Mac OSX version 10.12 and newer.
Source¶
While it is certainly more difficult to compile Krita from source thanit is to install from prebuilt packages, there are certain advantagesthat might make the effort worth it:
You can follow the development of Krita on the foot. If you compileKrita regularly from the development repository, you will be able toplay with all the new features that the developers are working on.
You can compile it optimized for your processor. Most pre-built packagesare built for the lowest-common denominator.
You will be getting all the bug fixes as soon as possible as well.
You can help the developers by giving us your feedback on features asthey are being developed, and you can test bug fixes for us. This ishugely important, which is why our regular testers get their name inthe about box just like developers.
Of course, there are also some disadvantages: when building from the currentdevelopment source repository you also get all the unfinished features.It might mean less stability for a while, or things shown in the userinterface that don't work. But in practice, there is seldom really badinstability, and if it is, it's easy for you to go back to a revisionthat does work.
So… If you want to start compiling from source, begin with the latestbuild instructions from the guide here.
If you encounter any problems, or if you are new to compiling software,don't hesitate to contact the Krita developers. There are three maincommunication channels:
irc: webchat.freenode.net, channel #krita
Krita's main goal is to help artists create a digital painting from scratch. Krita is used by comic artists, matte painters, texture artists, and illustrators around the world. This section explains some common workflow that artists use in Krita. When you open a new document in Krita for the first time, you can start painting instantly. The brush tool is selected by default and you just have to paint on the canvas. However, let us look at what artists do in Krita. Below are some of the common workflows used in Krita:
Speed Painting and Conceptualizing¶
Some artists work only on the digital medium, sketching and visualizing concepts in Krita from scratch. As the name suggests a technique of painting done within a matter of hours to quickly visualize the basic scene, character, look and feel of the environment or to denote the general mood and overall concept is called a speed painting. Finishing and finer details are not the main goals of this type of painting, but the representation of form value and layout is the main goal.
Some artists set a time limit to complete the painting while some paint casually. Speed painting then can be taken forward by adding finer details and polish to create a final piece. Generally, artists first block in the composition by adding patches and blobs of flat colors, defining the silhouette, etc. Krita has some efficient brushes for this situation, for example, the brushes under Block Tag like Block fuzzy, Block basic, layout_block, etc.
After the composition and a basic layout has been laid out the artists add as many details as possible in the given limited time, this requires a decent knowledge of forms, value perspective and proportions of the objects. Below is an example of speed paint done by David Revoy in an hours time.
Artwork by David Revoy, license : CC-BY
You can view the recorded speed painting demo for the above image on Youtube.
Colorizing Line Art¶
Often an artist, for example a comic book colorist, will need to take a pencil sketch or other line art of some sort and use Krita to paint underneath it. This can be either an image created digitally or something that was done outside the computer and has been scanned.
Preparing the line art¶
If your images have a white or other single-tone background, you can use either of the following methods to prepare the art for coloring:
Place the line art at the top of the layer stack and set its layer blending mode to Multiply.
If you want to clean the line art a bit you can press the Ctrl+L shortcut or go to Filters ‣ Adjust ‣ Levels.
You can clean the unwanted grays by moving the white triangle in the input levels section to left and darken the black by moving the black triangle to right.
If you draw in blue pencils and then ink your line art you may need to remove the blue lines first to do that go to Filters ‣ Adjust ‣ Color adjustment curves or press the Ctrl+M shortcut.
Now select Red from the drop-down, click on the top right node on the graph and slide it all the way down. Or you can click on the top right node and enter 0 in the input field. Repeat this step for Green too.
Krita is also in the official repos, you can install it from Yast.
Fedora¶
Krita is in the official repos, you can install it by using packagekit (Add/Remove Software) or by writing the following command in terminal.
dnfinstallkrita
You can also use the software center such as gnome software center or Discover to install Krita.
Debian¶
The latest version of Krita available in Debian is 3.1.1.To install Krita type the following line in terminal:
aptinstallkrita
Arch¶
Arch Linux provides krita package in the Extra repository. You caninstall Krita by using the following command:
pacman-Skrita
You can also find Krita pkgbuild in arch user repositories, but it is not guaranteed to contain the latest git version.
Flatpak¶
We also have Flatpak for nightlies and stable builds, these builds are not maintained by the core developers themselves. You can either get the builds from the KDE community website or from the Flathub Maintainers. The KDE community website only offers nightly builds of flatpak.
To install flatpak build from the software center just open the flatpakrepo files with Discover or the software center provided by your distribution:
After adding one of the above repos you can then search for Krita and the software center will show you the flatpak version for installation.
If you prefer doing it from terminal you can use the following commands to install Krita's flatpak build
For KDE Flatpak Repo:
flatpak--userremote-add--if-not-existskdeapps--fromhttps://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo
flatpak--userinstallkdeappsorg.kde.krita-nightly
For installing it from Flathub Repo:
flatpak--userremote-add--if-not-existsflathubhttps://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak--userinstallkdeappsorg.kde.krita
Snaps¶
There are snap packages provided by the Ubuntu snap developers, these are generally not up to date. The Krita Developers do not provide or build the snap packages themselves.To install Krita as a snap package, first install snapd application. Snapd is installed by default on Ubuntu distributions.
If you are on Ubuntu distribution then Krita's snap package may show up in the software center, or you can run the following command in terminal
Note
The Flatpak and Snap builds are not tested by the core developers of Krita, so you may encounter some bugs while running Krita installed from them.
OS X¶
You can download the latest binary from ourwebsite.The binaries work only with Mac OSX version 10.12 and newer.
Source¶
While it is certainly more difficult to compile Krita from source thanit is to install from prebuilt packages, there are certain advantagesthat might make the effort worth it:
You can follow the development of Krita on the foot. If you compileKrita regularly from the development repository, you will be able toplay with all the new features that the developers are working on.
You can compile it optimized for your processor. Most pre-built packagesare built for the lowest-common denominator.
You will be getting all the bug fixes as soon as possible as well.
You can help the developers by giving us your feedback on features asthey are being developed, and you can test bug fixes for us. This ishugely important, which is why our regular testers get their name inthe about box just like developers.
Of course, there are also some disadvantages: when building from the currentdevelopment source repository you also get all the unfinished features.It might mean less stability for a while, or things shown in the userinterface that don't work. But in practice, there is seldom really badinstability, and if it is, it's easy for you to go back to a revisionthat does work.
So… If you want to start compiling from source, begin with the latestbuild instructions from the guide here.
If you encounter any problems, or if you are new to compiling software,don't hesitate to contact the Krita developers. There are three maincommunication channels:
irc: webchat.freenode.net, channel #krita
Krita's main goal is to help artists create a digital painting from scratch. Krita is used by comic artists, matte painters, texture artists, and illustrators around the world. This section explains some common workflow that artists use in Krita. When you open a new document in Krita for the first time, you can start painting instantly. The brush tool is selected by default and you just have to paint on the canvas. However, let us look at what artists do in Krita. Below are some of the common workflows used in Krita:
Speed Painting and Conceptualizing¶
Some artists work only on the digital medium, sketching and visualizing concepts in Krita from scratch. As the name suggests a technique of painting done within a matter of hours to quickly visualize the basic scene, character, look and feel of the environment or to denote the general mood and overall concept is called a speed painting. Finishing and finer details are not the main goals of this type of painting, but the representation of form value and layout is the main goal.
Some artists set a time limit to complete the painting while some paint casually. Speed painting then can be taken forward by adding finer details and polish to create a final piece. Generally, artists first block in the composition by adding patches and blobs of flat colors, defining the silhouette, etc. Krita has some efficient brushes for this situation, for example, the brushes under Block Tag like Block fuzzy, Block basic, layout_block, etc.
After the composition and a basic layout has been laid out the artists add as many details as possible in the given limited time, this requires a decent knowledge of forms, value perspective and proportions of the objects. Below is an example of speed paint done by David Revoy in an hours time.
Artwork by David Revoy, license : CC-BY
You can view the recorded speed painting demo for the above image on Youtube.
Colorizing Line Art¶
Often an artist, for example a comic book colorist, will need to take a pencil sketch or other line art of some sort and use Krita to paint underneath it. This can be either an image created digitally or something that was done outside the computer and has been scanned.
Preparing the line art¶
If your images have a white or other single-tone background, you can use either of the following methods to prepare the art for coloring:
Place the line art at the top of the layer stack and set its layer blending mode to Multiply.
If you want to clean the line art a bit you can press the Ctrl+L shortcut or go to Filters ‣ Adjust ‣ Levels.
You can clean the unwanted grays by moving the white triangle in the input levels section to left and darken the black by moving the black triangle to right.
If you draw in blue pencils and then ink your line art you may need to remove the blue lines first to do that go to Filters ‣ Adjust ‣ Color adjustment curves or press the Ctrl+M shortcut.
Now select Red from the drop-down, click on the top right node on the graph and slide it all the way down. Or you can click on the top right node and enter 0 in the input field. Repeat this step for Green too.
Now the whole drawing will have a blue overlay, zoom in and check if the blue pencil lines are still visible slightly. If you still see them, then go to Blue Channel in the color adjustment and shift the top right node towards left a bit, Or enter a value around 190 (one that removes the remaining rough lines) in the input box.
Now apply the color adjustment filter, yes we still have lots of blue on the artwork. Be patient and move on to the next step. Go to Filters ‣ Adjust ‣ Desaturate or press the Ctrl+Shift+U shortcut. Now select Max from the list.
Hint
It is good to use non-photo-blue pencils to create the blue lines as those are easy to remove. If you are drawing digitally in blue lines use #A4DDED color as this is closer to non-photo-blue color.
You can learn more about doing a sketch from blue sketch to digital painting here in a tutorial by David Revoy.
After you have a clean black and white line art you may need to erase the white color and keep only black line art, to achieve that go to Filters ‣ Colors ‣ Color to Alpha… menu item. Use the dialog box to turn all the white areas of the image transparent. The Color Picker is set to White by default. If you have imported scanned art and need to select another color for the paper color then you would do it here.
This will convert the white color in your line art to alpha i.e. it will make the white transparent leaving only the line art. Your line art can be in grayscale color space, this is a unique feature in Krita which allows you to keep a layer in a color-space independent from the image.
Laying in Flat Colors¶
There are many ways to color a line art in Krita, but generally, these three are common among the artists.
Paint blocks of color directly with block brushes.
Fill with Flood Fill Tool.
Use a Colorize Mask.
Kira Drawing App
Blocking with brush¶
The first is the more traditional method of taking a shape brush or using the geometric tools to lay in color. This would be similar to using an analog marker or brush on paper. There are various block brushes in Krita, you can select Block Tag from the drop-down in the brush presets docker and use the brushes listed there.
Add a layer underneath your line art layer and start painting with the brush. If you want to correct any area you can press the E key and convert the same brush into an eraser. You can also use a layer each for different colors for more flexibility.
Filling with Flood Fill tool¶
The second method is to use the Flood fill tool to fill large parts of your line art quickly. This method generally requires closed gaps in the line art. To begin with this method place your line art on a separate layer. Then activate the flood fill tool and set the Grow selection to 2px, uncheck Limit to current layer if previously checked.
Choose a color from color selector and just click on the area you want to fill the color. As we have expanded the fill with grow selection the color will be filled slightly underneath the line art thus giving us a clean fill.
Colorize Mask¶
The third method is to take advantage of the built-in Colorize Mask. This is a powerful tool that can dramatically improve your workflow and cut you down on your production time. To begin coloring with the Colorize Mask, select your line art layer and click the Colorize Mask Editing Tool icon in the toolbar.
With the Colorize Mask Editing Tool enabled, click on the canvas—this will add a Colorize Mask layer to your document and make your lineart look a little blurry. You can now lay down solid brush strokes to indicate which areas should be colored in what colors:
Whenever you press the Update button in the Tool Options, you will see which colors will fill which areas. You can continue to edit your brush strokes until you are happy with the result. To get a clean look of your painting, disable the 'Edit key strokes' checkbox:
Once you are done, you can convert the Colorize Mask layer into a paint layer in the Layers docker. Have a look at the Colorize Mask manual to learn more about this tool.
Changing Line Art Color¶
To change the color of your line art, you can use the Alpha Lock feature. In the layer docker, click on the rightmost icon of your line art layer. It's the icon that looks like a little checker board:
When Alpha Lock is enabled, you can only change the color of the pixels, not their opacity—meaning that everything you paint will only change the colors of your existing lines, not add new lines.
If you want to change the color of your line art to one solid color, you can now use the bucket fill tool and it will only apply to your existing lines. Or if you want to apply several different colors to specific areas of your line art, you can quickly paint over your line art with a broad brush:
Painting¶
Starting from chaos¶
Here, you start by making a mess through random shapes and texture, then taking inspirations from the resulting chaos you can form various concepts. It is kind of like making things from clouds or finding recognizable shapes of things in abstract and random textures. Many concept artists work with this technique.
You can use brushes like the shape brush, or the spray brush to paint a lot of different shapes, and from the resulting noise, you let your brain pick out shapes and compositions.
You then refine these shapes to look more like shapes you think they look, and paint them over with a normal paintbrush. This method is best done in a painting environment.
Starting from a value based underground¶
This method finds its origins in old oil-painting practice: You first make an under-painting and then paint over it with color, having the dark underground shine through.
With Krita you can use blending modes for this purpose. Choosing the color blending mode on a layer on top allows you to change the colors of the image without changing the relative luminosity. This is useful, because humans are much more sensitive to tonal differences than the difference in saturation and hue. This'll allow you to work in grayscale before going into color for the polishing phase.
You can find more about this technique here.
Preparing Tiles and Textures¶
Many artists use Krita to create textures for 3d assets used for games animation, etc. Krita has many texture templates for you to choose and get started with creating textures. These templates have common sizes, bit depth and color profiles that are used for texturing workflow.
Kitra Art Program
Krita also has a real-time seamless tile mode to help texture artist prepare tiles and texture easily and check if it is seamless on the fly. The tiled mode is called wrap-around mode, to activate this mode got to View ‣ Wrap Around Mode. Now when you paint the canvas is tiled in real-time allowing you to create seamless pattern and texture, it is also easy to prepare interlocking patterns and motifs in this mode.
Creating Pixel Art¶
Krita can also be used to create a high definition pixel painting. The pixel art look can be achieved by using Index color filter layer and overlaying dithering patterns. The general layer stack arrangement is as shown below.
The index color filter maps specific user-selected colors to the grayscale value of the artwork. You can see the example below, the strip below the black and white gradient has an index color applied to it so that the black and white gradient gets the color selected to different values.
You can choose the required colors and ramps in the index color filter dialog as shown below.
Dithering can be used to enhance the look of the art and to ease the banding occurred by the index color filter. Krita has a variety of dithering patterns by default, these can be found in pattern docker. You can use these patterns as fill layer, then set the blend mode to overlay and adjust the opacity according to your liking. Generally, an opacity range of 10% - 25% is ideal.
Paint the artwork in grayscale and add an index color filter layer at the top then add the dithering pattern fill layer below the index color filter but above the artwork layer, as shown in the layer stack arrangement above. You can paint or adjust the artwork at any stage as we have added the index color filter as a filter layer.
You can add different groups for different colors and add different dithering patterns for each group.
Below is an example painted with this layer arrangement.
