Learn Your Way Around Krita

Sara Tepes Continues Her Series On The Free Painting Program By Taking A Tour Of Krita’s Tools And Its Pared-back Workspace

Krita is one of the best free painting programs available and includes a great variety of tools and features. While Photoshop has features that can be useful from painting to photo retouching to photo manipulation, too many options create a tough learning curve for a digital painter.

Krita keeps its interface painter friendly with a clean style and minimal distractions. Tools are accessibly placed, and most of the window is dedicated to the canvas. Since Krita has such a gentle learning curve, it’s easy – and important – to familiarise yourself with its features before diving into the painting process.

1. Creating a new document

Open up a new document by going to File>New. To control the size of the canvas, you can select from one of the templates in the Predefined drop-down menu, or either change the dimensions yourself. Choose either pixels or inches for your dimensions and set the canvas size to the ratio you want. I prefer a larger file size, no smaller than 3,000px on the shortest size but no larger than 7,000px on the longest. Finally, set your Resolution either to 300 or 600; the higher resolution, the greater quality for the final image.

2. The left toolbar