Spring is in the air, and with spring comes both the run-up to the release of Krita 2.7 and the Google Summer of Code. Last week, a bit delayed by the beautiful Swedish spring weather Cyrille Berger branched Krita to get ready for the next release, which will likely be early June. Enrico Guarnieri made a beautiful splash screen:
Krita 2.7 will be an awesome release with a host of cool new features.
Sahil Nagpal has added the ability to apply curves to the alpha channel to the curves filter. His first in-depth contribution to Krita and it works like a charm!
Check out Mifth's video on Vimeo (click here if the embedded video doesn't show for you)
Lukas Tvrdy has added support for creating seamless textures to Krita. Check out his blog to read all about it, if the embedded video doesn't work for you:
In the meantime, Lukas Tvrdy is working on integrating g'mic into Krita -- in one fell swoop expanding Krita's filter capabilities enormously. Check out David Revoy's tutorial on moving from paper sketches to digital illustration for an example!
Another fun and useful feature, especially for comics artists: file-backed layers. This is simply an external image file that you can embed in your layer stack as a read-only layer and that will update when the external image is changed. It can be scaled to the image resolution automatically. This is really useful when working on comics: the ink layer tends to be 600dpi while the color layer is 300 dpi.
In the meantime, sponsored by the Krita Development Fund (please consider subscribing!), Dmitry Kazakov has been improving the speed of painting on HDR images, fixed bugs in the filter brush, curves filter, color to alpha filter, histogram generation, generated layers, canvas centering after crop and -- most awesomely! -- some tablet issues when working with a dual monitor/cintiq setup! (Actually, a workaround for a Qt bug.)
For animators, the layer group switcher plugin is of interest. If you have a bunch of groups representing frames, you can now move from one frame to another with a simple keypress. Only the current group will be visible then.
And in the press, Muktware has an interview with yours truly on KDE and commercial support for Krita, while Linux Format in their June isse has compared Krita, Gimp, Mypaint, Inkscape and Pinta in their role as image editors. It's a fun read, even though one might quibble at some of the criteria that made Krita come out on top! And we got a report that Science et Vie Junior in France has also carried an article on Krita.
And finally, don't forget our Muses DVD project! The pre-order is still available!
From yesterday, KO GmbH, the Magdeburg based company co-founded by Krita maintainer Boudewijn Rempt has announced it will provide full commercial support for Krita. We all know that Krita is a great painting studio, and with the growing maturity of Krita, there are plenty of places where Krita can be used professionally, not just in small studios or by individual artists, but as part of the workflow in larger studios.
To make that work, commercial support is needed! KO provides access to a repo that provides Krita on CentOS 6 that is guaranteed to play nice with Maya, Nuke and Mari installs and is regularly updated, email, forum, chat and telephone support, training, custom development of plugins, bridges and special features.
Among other things, KO GmbH has sponsored the development of OpenColorIO support for Krita 2.6 and has developed Krita Sketch for Intel App-Up.
You can read the full announcement at the KO GmbH website.
The 2013 Libre Graphics Meeting is over and everyone has returned home and gone back to the drawing board or the keyboard. Krita has been very well represented at this LGM with three artists and a coder, giving three presentations and two awesome workshops!
The Medialab Prado venue was pretty much perfect: hacking space, auditorium, workshop space, open until late, and an endless supply of good coffee. The presentations were life-streamed, but there appear to be no recordings available yet.
(Image by Timothee Giet)
So what happened?
First, Timothee Giet gave his workshop on Krita Sketch. Unfortunately, what with slow network, it turned out to be quite hard to make sure everyone had Krita Sketch on their systems, so in the end, the workshop became more an "install and get introduced to Krita" workshop, which was pretty cool, too -- since the workshop was early on Thursday, and it meant many people had Krita on their system for the rest of the week!
That evening (or afternoon, for the Spanish among us, the days were long this year, with presentations going until well after Dutch dinner time!), Boudewijn presented the Krita Foundation. As regular readers of Krita news know, the Foundation was created to support Krita development.
This was closely followed by Timothee Giet speaking about Krita Sketch, how the project came to be, the goals, the gui design and his role in the development. This is what Krita Sketch looks like these days, and an update on Intel AppUp is expected soon!
The next day, Ramon Miranda gave a lightning talk on the Muses DVD he is preparing. Slated to be ready for Akademy in Bilbao (Ramon's hometown), the dvd promises to be wonderful, not just teaching Krita, but teaching the fundamentals of digital illustration. Pre-order your copy now!
The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.
Or read more about in the bilingual (Spanish/English) Flyer we handed out at LGM!
Also on Thursday, David Revoy gave his Krita workshop. starting with the basics of calibrating your tablet and creating an ergonomic setup, David continued teaching the fundamentals of underpainting (make sure you use only one, big, round brush, work in grayscale, never use the extrems of value available, switch between eraser and normal all the time, paint values, not symbols and remember this: it's painting that's a hard skill you need to work on, applications are easy to learn), and then coloring and detailing. There were some very pretty things made during this workshop!
The great thing about the Libre Graphics Meeting is, of course, getting together. There are developers, artists, thinkers, users. People are working on magazines, typefaces, music, generative art, illustrations, comics, layout tools and more. And it's a great place for teams to get together and start a cooperation initiatives, like the new brushpack resource specification, or ways Krita could integrate with the animation application Tupi or how the MyPaint brush engine could be integrated into Krita, Gimp or Tupi.
Let us all meet again, next year!
Next week, the Libre Graphics Meeting will happen again! This time in the Media Lab Prado in Madrid, and titled "Future Tools", it looks set to be an amazing experience. And with plenty of Krita content!
Timothée Giet will give a workshop on using Krita Sketch at 14:30, Thursday April 11th at the Libre Graphic Meeting in Medialab Prado‘s brand new building in Madrid city center.
Later that day, at 17:40, Boudewijn Rempt will introduce the Krita Foundation in a lightning talk. The Krita Foundation is essential for the future of Krita, we'll go through problems and challenges that the Foundation was created to cope with.
Hot on Boudewijn's heels, Timothée Giet will present the Krita Sketch project: Krita Sketch is touch-enabled tablet-oriented application derived from Krita. Timothée will discuss how the project happened and much more.
Then, on Friday, David Revoy will give a painting workshop with Krita. The main topic will be "speedpainting with Krita", so bring your laptops and tablets, and try to have the latest Krita installed! (Use David's scripts, for instance.) Place / Date / Hour: Friday 12 april 2013 at the Libre Graphic Meeting in Medialab Prado‘s brand new building in Madrid city center. Workshop will happen between 14h30 - 16h30 ( duration 2h ) in Room C.
All LGM long, Ramon Miranda will be around to answer questions about his "Muses" project, the second Krita training DVD, There will be ample opportunity for pre-orders on the spot, as well! Ramon speaks both Spanish and English, so grab the opportunity!
But, of course, you can also pre-order the DVD on-line:
The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.
Following the succesful "Comics with Krita" DVD by Timothee Giet (now sold out!), and supported by the Krita Foundation, Ramon Miranda has started working on the second Krita training DVD: Muses. Let yourself be inspired by Ramon's Muses, and learn how to paint wonderful and evocative images from a professional artist.
The DVD will have more than three hours of HD video focused on creating digital illustrations from scratch to the final print, including
- An explanation of Krita's gui and the best way to setup Krita for maximum productivity and fun. Ramon will demonstrate a solid and productive workflow.
- Creating interesting new brush presets, working with layers, masks and filters. color in theory and practice and an introduction to styles in art.
- Creating an illustration from scratch: creating the ideas to begin with, sketching, getting into the flow, blocking, shading and values, painting a face, finishing the artwork with color and effects, printing considerations.
"Muses" will come with a full set of brushes and brush presets, icons ready to use with your own presets and much more. The voice over will be in English and Spanish, with unobtrusive pop-over messages for extra clarity.
Muses -- the color sketch for the projected DVD cover
You can pre-order the DVD now from the Krita Foundation. If you do not wish to use paypal, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for alternative payment methods. Pre-ordering the DVD will help support Krita development. Currently, Dmitry Kazakov is being sponsored by the Krita Foundation to work on improved mask handling, performance and much more. The contents of the DVD will also be released as Creative Commons.
The pre-order price is just €27.50, including shipping. The DVD is expected to be ready for presentation at Akademy 2013 in Bilboa, Spain, July 13th.
And everyone who pre-orders will be credited on the DVD, too.
Ramon Miranda is an illustrator from Spain who has been using open source tools professionally for a long time. He is well known for his instruction videos, his beautiful art and his work on Gimp Paint Studio.
If you are at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid, you will be able to meet Ramon.
Thursday, 21st March, David Revoy, Boudewijn Rempt and Inge Wallin took a plane to London to visit Double Negative. Double Negative is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, VFX studio in London. We were invited by Simon Legrand, who works as a technical director at Double Negative. Simon has been using Krita for his work in a previous studio on G.I. Joe 2 and other unreleased titles, and he had invited us there, to meet with him and his colleagues from the industry.
On Thursday, we sat down with Simon and looked at ways Krita can be integrated in a VFX pipeline -- we're already doing pretty good, with OpenColorIO and OpenEXR support, but things could be better, still. Deep integration with Nuke, dynamic, file-based layers, an Adobe Bridge like image manager -- which made us think of Gwenview or Dolphin. In the evening, we sat down with Andrew Harvey from Reliance Mediaworks, formerly Digital Domain London where Simon made extensive use of Krita previously.
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David, Boudewijn, Inge and Simon in the Double Negative lobby |
Next day, Inge, as a representative of KO GmbH, started working on prices and support offerings, while Boudewijn started hacking on the file-based layers feature.
In the afternoon, Gavin Graham from Double Negative hosted a meeting in the Double Negative offices. He is a head of 3D at Double Negative. It was an awesome experience to present Krita to him and a room full of artists from different departments -- matte painters, texture painters, concept artists.
David gave live demos on a big screen of the features these people were asking for -- and sure, there were some wishes, like better cloning/healing, improved masking (which Dmitry Kazakov, sponsored by the Krita Foundation is already working on!), but it was great to see how well Krita already supports the needs of the VFX industry!
A great meeting was followed by an impressive tour of the Double Negative offices, room after darkened room full of people totally focused on the next blockbuster movie.
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Inge, Boudewijn and David in the Double Negative Office |
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Inge, Boudewijn and Gavin in the Double Negative Office |
Finally, on Friday night we went to a night club (first time in my life!) to meet with people from The Foundry. Nuke looks like a prime candidate to integrate with Krita, and now we only have to figure out how to do that...