This week I wanted to talk about an awesome illustration program I found. It’s called Krita. It’s a open source program, similar to the program GIMP, however, it was created with the specific purpose of digital illustrations in mind. It is geared towards concept artists, texture and matte painters, and illustrators and comic book artists. It even has templates to divide the canvas for your comic page. If you have a tablet for drawing, Krita works with most tablets (full list here) and supports pen pressure sensitivity. Everything about Krita is customizable, from your workspace to the brushes. You can even create your own! Do you have a favorite brush you created for Photoshop or Gimp? You can import those as well. It even has specific brushes for blending colors and each one blends it in a different way! (My favorite is the knife because it works like a digital palette knife!)

Two of Krita’s blending brushes

Even better, there’s a wrap-around mode so you can create textures or patterns. Once you enter the mode, it generates the pattern or texture in real time as you’re working so you can see where you need to edit to make it seamless. There’s also an option to create animations that I have yet to try. Krita also gives you the ability to open PSD files and save as a PSD file if you ever need to work across different programs. Krita even includes drawing tools to help with perspective and straight lines, a layer management system similar to Photoshop, layer masks, and so much more. 

The best part about Krita is that it is absolutely free! While the developers accept donations, you can download Krita for free from its website. I honestly love this program for creating digital illustrations and sketches. While its not 100% perfect, the team continues to update the software to make it better and add new options. I hope you’ll find Krita as useful as I do!

Until next week!

~Jordan