After ignoring a key feature of Krita, under pressure Neil Mohr brushes away all criticism and paints over his mistakes.
OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr hasn’t got an artistic bone in his body and finds copying is very flattering.
Last issue, we took you on a whirlwind tour of Krita, largely ignoring the fact that it’s primarily designed for digital artists and concentrating instead on getting used to the interface and looking at how it can be used for basic photo editing; selecting areas in various ways, manipulating colour and brightness, and touching up areas with the clone brush.
With the basic interface introduction out of the way, we can now spend time taking a closer look at Krita’s powerful Brush Engine. It enables Krita to mimic a host of natural drawing media and allows users to customise brushes to their needs. While this all works fine with a mouse, it takes full advantage of pressure-sensitive input, so to get the most out of the Brush Engine, a graphics tablet is the best tool to use.
The good news is that there is a wide range of affordable and highly capable graphics tablets available for Linux. We’re using the Wacom One Medium model that can be picked up for around £50 – though there’s plenty on eBay for half this. The Small model costs around £30, though we’d find that size a little tricky to use. Linux is also ready to rock when it comes to most tablets – see the boxout on settings (right), but the main takeaway is you can just plug in a Wacom tablet and it’ll work with tablet settings built into Ubuntu.
If you haven’t done so already, fire up Krita. Before delving into the Brush Engine and settings, we’ll point out the Pop-Up Palette, which gives you near instant access with a right-click to your favourite brushes, zoom levels, canvas rotation and colour settings. While it does provide fast access to brushes and settings, you might spot it’s doubling up on settings available from the top toolbar (brush settings) and the Brush Docker (right dock strip). However, these disappear when working in its distraction-free full-screen mode and when the pop-up palette comes into its own, providing instant brush controls while you draw.
We should point out that you can change the available visible brush settings from the flip-out Brush HUD dialog. Click the top-right settings button and you’ll find a list of available properties. The ones on the left are hidden while the right ones are visible, so you can add and remove them from the flip-out HUD.
The best way to get started, as with everything, is to dive in and try out these brushes. Krita offers a wide range of brush presets tailored for different artistic styles and tasks. You can access these presets from the Pop-Up Palette, as mentioned, or more fully in the Brush Presets Docker, bottom-right. Keep in mind that how you draw depends on the ta
