Krita vs. Photoshop (7) AGAIN

I installed the latest version of Krita and tried it out again now that I'm back on the Intuos 4. Naturally, it's awesome. Lots of great brushes. The way you can rotate canvas so easily is super cool. I know that rotating my canvas in PS7 is fuckin' stupid slow.

But dammit I just have so much creative energy invested in my PS7 setup. And it's fast. Like... my pen strokes in Krita have lag. I hate that. But when I do a stroke in Photoshop it's instantaneous. Feels very natural. So I guess I won't be budging from my digital grognard stance. I will continue to use a massively outdated drawing program on a massively outdated computer until it dies or I do.

In other news, I've been noodling some comic book ideas. Been a long god damn time since I did a proper comic. I might have mentioned it here before... but comics are a lot of work. Like, a metric shit ton. If you know a comics artist who actually does the work, kiss 'em. They deserve it.

Here's a rat man drawn rapidly in PS7 for shits and giggles.

Krita vs. PS

She approached the elder ibberlings cautiously...

A bit of doodling in Krita. I enjoy drawing with Krita quite a bit more than Photoshop, however there are certain shortcuts and features in my old PS7 that I miss dreadfully.

Krita doesn't have good macros (yet). One of the macros I wrote for PS7 simply expands a selection, fills it with the foreground color, then deselects it. This is a time saver when doing big black fills and prevents those annoying ghostly white lines showing the edges of your fill area (the expansion of the selection takes care of this).

There's really one giant, huge benefit to drawing in Krita over PS7. I can draw at any scale and the lines are nice and smooth. In PS7 I have to zoom in very close to get the lines smooth. If I draw from a distance, the lines are jagged and wobbly like I have a problem controlling my hand. But that isn't the case with Krita. And I really like that.

Risen

The Risen character class by Jayne Praxis.

Fugly God

Krita Colorize Mask

I was playing around with Krita, coloring some existing drawings. In Photoshop, I used a filter called BPelt to do quick flat color fills on line art. It worked very well. All you had to do was create some line art with closed loops... that is, you couldn't have any open shapes. Like if you had a person's eye you couldn't leave the ink line open or else it would just fill the eye with the same color as the face.

BPelt would fill with random colors. So then you could easily use the paint bucket tool to click and fill each area with the color you prefer. Then it was just a matter of the fun work of doing highlights and what-not.

In Krita, there is a tool called Colorize Mask. You click it, then you get a mask on a layer and you can just sort of draw color lines where you want color to go. So you want the ork to be red, just draw a red line in the ork's body. A blue line across the sky, a brown line across the adventurer's face, etc. Then when you finish the mask it will fill those areas with those colors.

It's pretty nifty. For flat colors, this is the only way to fly. Believe me when I say there's no fun in carefully "hand coloring" vast areas of a drawing with a totally flat color. Might as well let Krita do it for you. Then you can pump your efforts into highlights, color adjustments, shadows, textures, or whatever.

Krita and the Dog

I saw Krita a while back, maybe 1 or more years ago. I think it was actually last December right after I got my XP Pen tablet. I have been using Photoshop 6 or 7 for YEARS. I was using 6 when 7 was released and I switched over a year or two later. So I was still using PS 7 until this week.

All of you young folks and/or digital art geeks are grasping your chests, gasping for air. WHY would anyone continue using an old, old, ancient graphics program for that long??

Well, because it works for me. I'm a simple kind of guy and I want to use my art tools, not learn them. I dislike the learning phase because it makes me feel hobbled.

Anyway... I saw Krita and was drawn to it (pun intended) because it was current, well supported, and open source. So I downloaded the bastard and discovered that my cursor was offset by a mile. I tried to re-calibrate and all the usual tricks. Nothing worked. XP Pen and Krita did not get along. So I let it go and continued with PS 7.

Then recently I happened upon Krita again and decided to give it another whirl. This time I found the right answer online (you have to set your tablet as primary monitor) and WHAM... I'm cooking with fire.

Below is the first finished drawing I have created with Krita. The learning curve is not too steep. A lot of my beloved hotkeys are not the same (though I can modify that if I want). But Krita, so far, has not failed to do all the things that Photoshop 7 was able to do (well... the Save For Web function is PH is fantastic and Krita doesn't have it... grumble). What's more, I like the workspace better, the pre-installed brushes are better, and the whole thing seems to work more smoothly.

Still going to take some time. I had a few functions built into PS 7 that I'll have to work into Krita. For example, when I hit F4 in PS it would expand the current selection by a few pixels, fill the selection with black, then deselect it. I really got used to using that for fills. Also I had a lot of custom brushes in 7 that I already miss. I'll have to brush up on how to make more in Krita.

Straight inks with some halftone using the #5 round brush... a classic.

Added flat colors with some highlights.