Either if it's something traditional like pastel crayons or markers or something digital like new drawing software.
The latter is something I actually use more these days. Not that I don't ever touch a real brush again but it seems to grow more and more as 'my' medium, next to the plain old pencil for sketching of course.
Now, drawing (and painting) software can be an expensive thing, but there are actually free alternatives out there. Most of you must have heard of GIMP. It's doing pretty good as an alternative for Adobe Photoshop, especially seeing that Photoshop costs A LOT of money.
Lately I have seen people using other software as well, and I became too curious not to try them. Those I'm going to review here: Krita and MyPaint.
Oh, this reminds of the days I studied Artificial Intelligence (yes, I totally did for 4 months :P),
since open-source software is forever under-construction the website is full with calls for more help.
I tried to ignore the code-and-programming-talk while searching for the right version to download, but it actually did frighten me a bit already. I got it installed however, so there...no worries.
But when I tried to open it...it actually took some time. Even more time than Photoshop. But I guess that is because it's actually made for Linux, not Windows. I also was quite confused by the doubled windows when I wanted to open a new image-file and had a hard time finding the 'create' button, because the interface-frame was bigger than my desktop so I had to drag it up and make it smaller so I could actually click the create button. User friendly? Not that much.
Now, Krita's interface on first sight looks standard: tools on the left, options and advanced stuff on the right.
It has actually a decent amount of tools, everything you would need for a good painting session.
Yet one thing I really missed: the option to change the radius of the brush. So I had to look it up on Google, apparently..if you use the mouse you have to click about three times to change it. There wasn't a brush-slider in the version that I downloaded.
Now, if you read the comments below, you can see my post stirred quite something. That and they were already working on a brush-size-slide on the top, as you can see in this screenshot:
They also changed the standard shortcut to [ and ], which is used by most painting/drawing applications, so it's also compatible with the newer line of wacom tablets (which uses these shortcuts). Hooray!
At the moment Krita is still in a developmental state, is what I conclude. I'm certainly going to try it another time, since they also said to work on weighted-line smoothing, like is used in Manga Studio and Painttool SAI, which can be useful if you create comics or manga-styled art. Looking forward to it!
If you are not afraid something new, I think you should at least try Krita and see if it is something you like.
MyPaint
Now here is something I could get used to. MyPaint is quite the easy program. It doesn't have all the Photoshop-like options and is mainly focused on drawing. But it does have extensive options to change brush settings. Which reminds me of the iPad drawing app ProCreate (and that's a good thing!).
And it's fast. So I think I'll try MyPaint for sketching in the future!
Unfortunately, not for whole drawing projects. First, there is no option to save it in Photoshop format. There is .ora, which you can use in Gimp. But Photoshop is the industry standard so I can't use it professionally.
Next to that, I can't easily, from scratch, define the size of the canvas, like something 300 dpi A4 size. It's true that the canvas size increases as you 'pan' and draw, but can I really use it for a 300 dpi poster? Nope.
I understand that open source programs aren't supposed to be compatible with Photoshop or other Adobe software, but it would be nice. I guess it costs money (though I don't see Painttool SAI having a problem with it).
MyPaint is great for starters, for GIMP users or for real fast sketches.
After trying out both applications I can conclude that open-source software isn't really something I can use as an illustrator, else than sketching, thumbnailing or for-fun-doodles. Which is not to say that people shouldn't use it. The quality and the amount of options and brushes really did expand and amaze me. I wouldn't have thought that 'free' software could have that much.
I tried to ignore the code-and-programming-talk while searching for the right version to download, but it actually did frighten me a bit already. I got it installed however, so there...no worries.
But when I tried to open it...it actually took some time. Even more time than Photoshop. But I guess that is because it's actually made for Linux, not Windows. I also was quite confused by the doubled windows when I wanted to open a new image-file and had a hard time finding the 'create' button, because the interface-frame was bigger than my desktop so I had to drag it up and make it smaller so I could actually click the create button. User friendly? Not that much.
It has actually a decent amount of tools, everything you would need for a good painting session.
Yet one thing I really missed: the option to change the radius of the brush. So I had to look it up on Google, apparently..if you use the mouse you have to click about three times to change it. There wasn't a brush-slider in the version that I downloaded.
Now, if you read the comments below, you can see my post stirred quite something. That and they were already working on a brush-size-slide on the top, as you can see in this screenshot:
They also changed the standard shortcut to [ and ], which is used by most painting/drawing applications, so it's also compatible with the newer line of wacom tablets (which uses these shortcuts). Hooray!
At the moment Krita is still in a developmental state, is what I conclude. I'm certainly going to try it another time, since they also said to work on weighted-line smoothing, like is used in Manga Studio and Painttool SAI, which can be useful if you create comics or manga-styled art. Looking forward to it!
If you are not afraid something new, I think you should at least try Krita and see if it is something you like.
MyPaint
Now here is something I could get used to. MyPaint is quite the easy program. It doesn't have all the Photoshop-like options and is mainly focused on drawing. But it does have extensive options to change brush settings. Which reminds me of the iPad drawing app ProCreate (and that's a good thing!).
And it's fast. So I think I'll try MyPaint for sketching in the future!
Unfortunately, not for whole drawing projects. First, there is no option to save it in Photoshop format. There is .ora, which you can use in Gimp. But Photoshop is the industry standard so I can't use it professionally.
Next to that, I can't easily, from scratch, define the size of the canvas, like something 300 dpi A4 size. It's true that the canvas size increases as you 'pan' and draw, but can I really use it for a 300 dpi poster? Nope.
I understand that open source programs aren't supposed to be compatible with Photoshop or other Adobe software, but it would be nice. I guess it costs money (though I don't see Painttool SAI having a problem with it).
MyPaint is great for starters, for GIMP users or for real fast sketches.
After trying out both applications I can conclude that open-source software isn't really something I can use as an illustrator, else than sketching, thumbnailing or for-fun-doodles. Which is not to say that people shouldn't use it. The quality and the amount of options and brushes really did expand and amaze me. I wouldn't have thought that 'free' software could have that much.
Hi Petra,
ReplyDeleteI'm Boudewijn Rempt, I'm the maintainer of Krita. I'm always glad to get feeback on Krita, but I'm afraid that somehow you did get hold of quite an old version of Krita, judging from the screenshot. It must be version 2.3 (released in 2010) or even earlier, and an alpha version at that, because it doesn't have two sliders in the top toolbar that can be set to show opacity, flow and brush size. We are currently working on releasing Krita 2.6, where the default is to show opacity and size. Of course, as you say, software is always under construction, and we're already working on new features for 2.7, like weighted line smoothing for inking comics.
As for the shortcuts to set the brush size: comma and dot were picked by an artist who uses Krita professionally (http://www.davidrevoy.com). I guess he is right-handed and keeps his keyboard to the left of his tablet, making , and . easy to get at -- and since he's French, the Photoshop shortcuts of [ and ] are inconvenient to him :-).
Other shortcuts in that area are k and l to darken and lighten the current color and o and p to change the opacity. We do need to document the shortcuts better, but if you go to Settings/Shortcuts, you can change the shortcuts to fit with what you're used to.
Most users change the radius of the brush by pressing shift and dragging the stylus in and out, though.
I do not know why the initial create image window was too big for your screen: it might have been a bug in the 2.3 version, I vaguely remember something like that. I check Krita before release on a 1024x768 screen and the startup screen fits in that resolution. The painting screen not so much, but then, that's not a resolution that's really suitable for an application like Krita.
Btw, we discussed the brush size shortcuts, and decided to use [ and ] -- your argument for the setup of the shortcuts of a tablet is a strong one, so we'd better align with that.
ReplyDeleteI'm after all not sure which version of Krita you tested, since a quick google found the screenshot you used came from the blog of one of the Krita developers: http://slangkamp.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/krita24alpha1.png, and I also don't know whether you tested on Windows or Linux.
As noted, Krita on Windows is still highly experimental and indeed does start slow, especially for the first time.
I changed the post after you and Sven commented. I really think the changes are great and I would love to give it another try!
DeleteHi Boudewijn, thanks for your reply (you're fast...)!
ReplyDeleteI've actually downloaded and tried version 2.5.2.
(The screenshot is from another website), since I did uninstall Krita after I tried it and didn't want to re-install it again only for the screenshot. This screenshot actually looks the same to me for the version I had installed, but yes I'm not a frequent Krita-user or anything so I wouldn't know.
However, even in 2.5.2 I didn't see a brush-size slide.
It's good that a default-size-slide is being worked on, I think it is one of the most important things when you work with brushes. Also, line smoothing is quite awesome :)!
I can't talk for every digital artist or illustrator out there, but I think most of us are used to the standard buttons of Photoshop or Painter. These are also used in applications like ArtRage and Painttool SAI (and I guess even more programs alike). My advice would be to approach more than one artist for getting feedback about the standard buttons settings. Certainly not everyone is French or has his/hers keyboard on the left of the tablet. But that's just my opinion...this is not my software of course.
Either than that, if I could give any advice it would be to include a very very short introduction of the usability of Krita when it's used for the first time. For me I find that so much more user friendly than to look it up on Google or in any sort of give document.
It's really cool though that you can create an application like this, I can only imagine it is not easy to do, so: thumbs up!
Actually -- not sure where the comment I just tried to place has gone, but the wacom tablet shortcut key argument was compelling enough that 2.6 will have [ and ] as shortcuts. I'll have to re-train myself...
ReplyDeleteAw that's great, hopefully more tablet-artists will like it :) !
DeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteanother Krita developer here. You got the picture from my blog and that is the state from two years ago. What you should be seeing is something like this http://slangkamp.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/smooth4.png
We have several artists, but most of them use shift+drag instead of the shortcuts as that much faster. We changed the default a few minutes ago to [ and ].
Krita works in some aspects different than Phothoshop, you can't simply assume that everything will be the same.
Yup, that's great :)
DeleteYou guys take this very seriously I see. I mean, it's only a review you know, and of course it's different than Photoshop...it's open source, I understand that.
Even Photoshop isn't always the same. For example the shortcuts for the brush size. In the german version of Photoshop they used "." and "," till Photoshop 7. With CS it was changed to "รถ" and "#".
Delete