Get started with Krita

What Krita is

Krita is a drawing program for digital art. Not for cropping photos and not for putting together a logo from ready-made shapes, but for painting: brushes that behave like real brushes, pressure sensitivity if you have a drawing tablet, layers you can rework afterward.

For a business, it is the tool for when you need to draw something that does not exist. A mascot, an illustration for the packaging, a hand-drawn background for the sign in the store. Krita also handles frame-by-frame animation, which is enough for a short loop for Instagram.

It is free, is under GPL and is made by illustrators for illustrators. The files you save are yours, in an open format, with no account and no subscription.

Windows

Download the installation file from krita.org and run it. There is also a version in the Microsoft Store that costs money; it is the same program, and the payment goes to development. If you have no money to spend, the version from krita.org is just as complete.

If you have a drawing tablet, install its driver before you start Krita for the first time. The order matters more often than it should.

Linux Mint

Open the Software Manager, search for Krita and install it. That works, and it is the route we recommend if you just want to get started.

The version in Mint's own repository is often a year or more behind, though. If you want the new one, choose the Flathub version in the Software Manager, or run this in the terminal:

flatpak install flathub org.kde.krita

Krita is also available as an AppImage at krita.org. That file needs permission to run as a program, via right-click, Properties and the Permissions tab. If it does not start, a library is missing: on Mint 22 the package is called libfuse2t64, on Mint 21 it is called libfuse2, and both are installed with the Software Manager or apt.

Three things to do first

1. Create a new document and look at the fields for resolution and image dimensions. If the image will be printed, set 300 dpi right away, the resolution determines how sharp the print will be. If it will only be on the web, the dpi number does not matter, it is the number of pixels (the pixel dimensions) that determines how the image looks on a screen. Discovering that afterwards means you redraw.
2. Try the brush groups in the list on the right. The difference between a pencil brush and a watercolor brush in Krita is not cosmetic, they behave differently, and ten minutes of scribbling saves hours of searching later.
3. Find the button for eraser mode in the toolbar at the top. It turns the brush you already have in your hand into an eraser and back again, instead of you switching tools back and forth. That is the function you will use most often.

The most common trap

Painting everything in a single layer. It is fast, it feels natural, and then the background needs to be replaced and you have to start over from nothing.

Put the sketch lines in one layer, the color in one below, and the background at the bottom. Then you can throw away the sketch when it is no longer needed, change the background color in a second, and change the main subject without touching the rest. Name the layers too, because once there are more than five, they are all called Layer 7 otherwise.

One more thing: save in Krita's own format .kra while you work. PNG and JPG flatten all the layers, and then the work is gone.