Join GDQuest's Kickstarter: "Create your Own Games with Godot, the Free Game Engine"

Nathan Lovato, the author of the Brushes for Illustrators and Concept Artists Krita brush preset pack and many Krita tutorials is running a kickstarter to create a new course on creating games with free software. He's also sponsoring a developer to work on Krita

Here's what Nathan says:

"I've been working with Photoshop for years, back when I worked as a game artist and designer. I then used Krita for painting and Affinity Designer for graphic design, side-by-side. Work is always busy, so I have to produce pictures quickly. For a long time, as it's not its focus, Krita wasn't the most productive option for graphic designers."

"It kept getting better over the past years and, since January, it's my main art program. Game assets, banners, YouTube thumbnails, or some photo editing. I do the bulk of my work with it, and it's going well!"

"With its rich non-destructive feature set and its great color and layer management tools, it's the most versatile Free Software to do graphic design for me. If you need to draw vector shapes, it plays very well with Inkscape, which I still use to create text and copy to Krita at the moment."

"All the thumbnails you can see on our channel lately were made in Krita. I use File Layers to include reusable graphics, layer styles to add shadows, to give some 3d shape to text layers, and filter layers so I can tweak the value and color contrast of my compositions."

"Right now, layer styles can slow down the program quite a bit, so you want to add them at the end, or to flatten the layers as you work."

"They're powerful! With the ability to reuse styles from other layers in one click, or to save libraries of styles to reuse across documents, they can save you a considerable amount of time."

"Doing graphic design work or game assets in particular, it is already productive if you set up a good workflow. I will be honest: I do miss a few features for faster and more precise work. Mainly:"

"1. Better text editing tools" "2. Snapping support for the pixel layers' bounding boxes" "3. Faster layer styles" "4. The ability to arrange and distribute pixel layers"

"The developers are aware of all of these though, and Scott Petrovic has been working on automated text updates, among many other user experience improvements."

"I should add some flexible batch layer export to the list, but we're on this! Razvan has been working on a Free plugin to batch export layers in a highly configurable way, based on their name. Creating this add-on lead Razvan to make some small contributions to Krita itself. Also, we're looking to do more in the future. ?"

"The plugin is available in alpha: https://github.com/GDquest/GDquest-art-tools"