Adobe Offsetting: October 2015
Over the past two years, Krita has become a force to be reckoned with in the digital painting arena. Their ambitious developers have launched two successful Kickstarter campaigns and delivered numerous new features, bug fixes, and enhancements. Currently, they’re busy at work optimizing Krita’s speed, making it a direct competitor to Photoshop. For October, I decided purchase Krita’s new DVD training series, Secret of Krita, as my Adobe offsetting for the month.
Secrets revealed
Secrets of Krita is a series of videos that goes in depth to explain Krita by taking users through all of the tools and functions. Many digital artists, including me, are interested in comics. Recently, I read The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics by Freddie E. Williams. It’s an amazing book, loaded with helpful tips and processes for creating comics in Photoshop. I enjoyed Freddie’s book and learned a lot, but I was left wondering how I could apply what I learned to Krita. With these videos, I’m hoping to demystify how to use Krita and rely on it more as my mainstay for illustration.
The teacher behind the training
Timothée Giet is the talent behind the Secrets of Krita. He teaches at Activ-Design—a training center that specializes in teaching digital arts with free software. For Secrets, Timothée has synthesized what he teaches in the classroom and has made it available to all Krita users with theses videos.
Back in 2003, Timothy started working digitally with the use of proprietary software. In 2008 he began to learn more about Linux and had fully switched over to Linux and FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open-Source Software) full time by 2009. “I see it as a way to really control my tools instead of being dependent on them,” Timothée stated. As an artist he prefers using Krita over other software for illustration because of its brush engines and responsive canvas.
Over the moon
Krita’s spellbound over their third DVD, feeling that it’s the most comprehensive training series to date. Lead developer for Krita, Boudewijn Rempt, explained, “This is the third DVD the Krita Foundation produced together with an experience Krita user—and educator. Timothee has been teaching classes in using Krita in France for quite some time now, and it’s of course his second DVD for Krita. This time, we decided to go really in detail. Comics with Krita was an introduction to using Krita for a particular workflow, Muses was a general introduction to digital painting using Krita. Secrets is really a DVD about getting the best out of Krita.”
Pros are taking notice
Earlier this year, Paris-8 university announced their new-found dedication to open source software, including Krita—citing Adobe’s lack of flexible pricing as the university’s main reason for shifting to open source alternatives. This is not to say that they won’t continue to use software like Maya and support students’ use of Adobe software. Paris-8 instead is building a curriculum that incorporates more open source alternatives. As a test, students worked on an intensive short film called “Le Désert Du Sonora” using Blender, Natron, and Krita. It’s great to see schools like Active-Design and Paris-8 leading the charge for using open source software in the classroom.
Additional support
As part of my monthly contribution, I am also a subscribing member of the Blender Cloud with a reoccurring monthly donation. If you are just learning Blender, this site is a wonderful resource of videos for learning modeling and animation techniques. They also have access to all the art and assets from their upcoming open-source animation, Cosmos Laundromat.
