Krita is a free, open-source digital painting program for Windows, macOS and Linux. It is built for creating illustrations, concept art, comics, textures and hand-drawn animation. Its painting tools work with a layered canvas, so sketches, ink, color and effects can remain separately editable throughout an artwork.
Brush engines
A brush preset in Krita combines settings with a brush engine, which determines how marks are produced. A color-smudge brush blends paint, while shape, particle and filter engines create other kinds of strokes and effects. Artists can modify presets, save the results and organize them with tags instead of rebuilding a brush for each drawing.
The freehand brush uses tablet input to control the mark. Stroke smoothing changes how that input becomes a line: weighted smoothing reduces irregular movements, while the stabilizer averages input and lets the painted stroke follow behind the cursor. Pressure and other tablet sensors can also be smoothed, making these controls useful for deliberate outlines as well as freehand painting.
Brushes and textures can be imported in resource packs. Krita also lets artists bundle their own resources for reuse or sharing. Movable dockers and saved workspaces keep the relevant presets, color controls and layers within reach for different kinds of drawing.
Drawing assistants
Drawing assistants provide guides that the brush can follow, including straight lines, ellipses and perspective constructions. The snapping control determines how strongly a stroke follows an assistant. This allows a perspective guide to influence hand-drawn architecture without turning the entire image into vector geometry.
For repeating textures, wrap-around mode displays copies of the canvas horizontally and vertically. Painting updates those copies as the original changes, exposing the boundaries where a texture repeats. An artist can work across those edges while seeing the resulting pattern rather than repeatedly offsetting the image to inspect a seam.
Layers and masks
Krita builds the visible picture from an ordered stack of layers. Keeping line art above a separate color layer allows the colors to change without repainting the outlines. Layers can be named, grouped and color-labeled, while blending modes and transparency control how their contents combine.
Alpha inheritance confines a layer’s visible painting to the combined opaque content beneath it. Using it within a group makes the group’s base artwork the boundary for shading or color variations. The grouping matters: an opaque background beneath the artwork would otherwise provide a boundary across the whole canvas.
Masks keep several kinds of revision separate from the original pixels. A transparency mask hides portions of a layer, a filter mask applies an effect, and a transform mask changes the displayed geometry. These can be adjusted or hidden later; masks on a group can affect several artwork layers together.
Vector layers for comics
Vector layers give comics and illustrations editable shapes alongside painted content. Krita uses SVG for its vector graphics, and shape anchor points can be adjusted after placement. Speech-bubble templates from the vector library can be brought onto the canvas and reshaped, while the text tool adds lettering.
Frame animation
Krita’s animation workspace adds a timeline for frame-by-frame raster drawing. Artists create or duplicate drawings on animated layers, move frames to change their timing and choose the playback range and frame rate. Imported audio provides a timing reference while the drawings are developed.
Onion skins show neighboring drawings as tinted overlays. Their colors, visibility and opacity can be adjusted to compare poses and draw the frames between them. Transform masks and animation curves can also move artwork between keyed positions without repainting its pixels for every position.
Animations can be rendered to video or exported as image sequences for further assembly. Krita keeps animation frames in memory, so long sequences with large canvases and many layers can become demanding. Its focus is drawing animated shots; extensive video and audio montage calls for a separate editor.
Krita’s file formats
The native KRA format retains the editable Krita project, including its layers and other working features. PSD import and export provide another route for exchanging layered artwork, with support for elements such as paint layers, groups, blending modes, vector shapes and transparency masks. PSD conversion does not preserve every application-specific feature, so KRA remains the working format for retaining Krita’s own project structure.
Color management
Krita supports ICC profiles for color-managed work and OpenColorIO with OpenEXR for HDR imagery. These controls connect the painting canvas to a wider color pipeline, including work where the stored image contains a greater brightness range than an ordinary screen view can show.
