Painting in Krita

03/13/26

I've been spending a little time lately getting used to the open-source painting program Krita. Once you get over some of the little UI hangups it's a surprisingly robust drawing and painting experience. First thing that jumps out at you is that your Wacom tablet just works. After fiddling with PSUserConfig files and WinTab and I don't know what for years using Photoshop, it was a relief to find my Wacom pressure sensitivity just worked in Krita.

And it works beautifully. The brushes are a delight to use. I don't know what they've done, but the defaults and their pressure curves feel really nicely tuned. There's already a lot of good built-in brushes for sketching and inking. And if you like you can go to the Krita community and find many, many more excellent brush bundles. The one I decided to try this time were the Memileo Impasto Brushes, giving you some real nice thick paint strokes with some nice baked-in lighting effects.

I ended up painting a flooded Danish S-train station that I might use as a background for a short, little animation project. So I sketched some characters for the short animation. Sailing under the station will be these two scavengers/sailors on a boat rigged with a big claw for picking things up in the flooded Danish suburb in the future. I'm hoping the animation will be like a sweet, little vignette of what is otherwise a pretty bleak future.