Krita..!

Oh my god I’ve become such a Microsoft Hater. But I’m also a Clip Studio Paint user, and it’s the sole reason I still use Windows.

I guess I haven’t talked about this on our site at all, since I’ve not been very active on here for the past few years!! But we’ve been working on migrating to Linux.

Now. We were able to get CSP working via Bottles on our laptop (Linux) a few months ago, so I don’t think switching completely to Linux would make CSP fully inaccessible to us? But I also didn’t really like running it through Bottles.

I sent a feature request to Celsys asking for a Linux version of Clip Studio Paint, but I doubt anything will come of it unless they receive a lot of requests for a Linux port.

So because my hatred of Microsoft gets stronger every time I must use one of their products, and is steadily overpowering my love of Clip Studio Paint, I’ve started learning Krita.

I only began drawing stuff in Krita the other week. And this week I have continued to do so!! I’m starting to get the hang of it, I think.

Key differences so far:

Clipping/ layer masks seem to work completely differently. I’ve used this feature a few times now, and I don’t think I fully get it yet, but I’m getting there. It’s tied up in the way layer groups work, which feels intuitive enough.
The toolbar is way more cluttered… This is because Krita doesn’t let you hide/reorganise tool buttons. I think there might be a way to remove some of the buttons you don’t use via python scripting? But I haven’t looked too far into that side of things yet. Not too bad, since I mostly use keyboard shortcuts to switch tools anyways.
The eraser tool? It behaves more like drawing with transparency in CSP. Once I set my main brush to use “eraser switch size”, I got on fine. I used draw with transparency a lot in Clip, so if anything, eraser switch size makes this a slight improvement over CSP’s offerings.
Holy shit, Krita has so many layer blending modes??? Very cool, haven’t tested them out yet but… I’m looking respectfully. 👀
Brush settings (like brush size, opacity etc) live in the top bar, and can’t be moved to a docker… Once again, my reliance on keyboard shortcuts comes in clutch. ctrl+alt+drag to change brush size, my beloved.
The text tool is a bit worse… but for annotations, I can always just write directly on the canvas, and I guess I don’t mind the idea of lettering my comics/ zines in an external program that much.

I’ve tried Krita a few times over the years, and it seems to be a lot more stable/ feature-rich now than it was the first time I tried it. I think switching art programs will always be a bit of a struggle, though - how much of your old workflow/ preferences can be carried over? How many things do you need to learn to do in the new-software way?

Anyways, here’s some art I drew in Krita!! I haven’t drawn that much in it yet, so I’m fully expecting to run up against more things that work differently/don’t feel intuitive to me. For example, I’ve not looked into Krita’s halftone offerings, but I expect those are probably pretty different?

A black and white line drawing of Phi, holding their world. Colourful pastel shooting stars swirl around him.

Drawn mooostly on one of my University Centre’s Cintiqs. I think I ultimately prefer pen tablets to screen tablets, but it was neat to get to try a Cintiq.

Inspired by this artfight attack by ElliotInfinity!! b/w + spot colours is such a nice combo for Phi. Miight do some further value tweaks + finishing touches later.

My current favourite brush pack works in lots of different art software, and being able to use brushes I’m already comfortable + familiar with is helping me a lot with adjusting to Krita! Thank you TOMB of NULL, you’re so cool.

A line-drawing with a chunky graphic quality to it. It's some sort of portrait, but most of the image is cut off, so all that can really be seen is a horizontal slice of the character's face, with faer eye roughly centred.

You don’t get to see the full image for this one sorry. It came out really cute though!! This is where I started to explore the layer clipping/masking tools a little more.

I’ve also done some Uni work in Krita, but not a lot… it’s early days right now, so I think I’ll share when the project in question is more well-rounded/developed :)

I’ll try to keep further notes on the transition from CSP to Krita! That way I can talk about it more if I want to. Not sure how useful that’ll be to others, but it’s my blog, and I’ll talk about whatever I want!! Might be good for me to have a record of my thoughts as I move over, too.