Monthly Report - April 2026
Krita 5.3.0/6.0.0 is here, and 5.3.1/6.0.1 followed soon after.
Read on for a look at development news and the Krita-Artists forum's featured artwork from last month.
Development Report
Krita 5.3.0/6.0.0 Released!
Krita 5.3.0/6.0.0 has finally been released!
However, some Windows users experienced slowdowns with 5.3.0. After much effort by users and developers trying to track down the problem, it was determined some external apps were triggering slowdowns in Qt Accessibility.
The problem was fixed with a backported Qt patch, and 5.3.1/6.0.1 released.
Fixes in 5.3.1/6.0.1
That release also contains a few other fixes. Resize Canvas's canvas size values no longer become huge after toggling 'Constrain proportions" (bug; change).
On Krita 6, incremental version failing to save and incremental backup freezing Krita (bug; change), and moving or copy-pasting a keyframe doing nothing (bug; change) were fixed. Drag-and-dropping an image no longer crashes on Wayland (change).
5.3.1.1 Released for Android
On Android, 5.3.1 introduced some regressions, which were fixed in 5.3.1.1. Editing a text field on Android 12 or older once again doesn't crash (change), which was related to fixes for the text edit popup covering text and the window panning up when using Text Tool (bug 1, bug 2; change 1; change 2).
Handling stylus buttons of some devices works again, and OnePlus stylus button (F21) is middle click (change 1, change 2), Huawei stylus double-tap gesture (Android key 718) is F25 (change).
Additionally, setting fallback languages has been disabled, as it makes the UI unusably slow (CCbug; change).
On macOS, 5.3.1.1/6.0.1.1 was released to fix an issue with Krita's built-in FFmpeg not working due to incorrect entitlements.
Further Developments
Wolthera has started working on the roadmap goal of improving HDR. In the unstable Krita Next builds, canvas decorations such as the transparency checkerboard, tool outlines, and the color sampler (bug 1, bug 2; change); reference images (bug; change); and the pixel grid (change) in are now displayed properly in HDR.
Luna continues to refine the Selection Actions Bar. An issue where the bar disappeared when toggling selection visibility was fixed (change), it's no longer interactable when covered by the pop-up palette (change), and a toggle for it was added to the selection tools' options docker (change).
Check out the Additional Changes section near the bottom of this post for more development build fixes and improvements.
Community Report
March 2026 Monthly Art Challenge Results
The winner of the "An unforgettable scene – 5 seconds before" challenge is…
Mayhem in 3…2…1 by Elixiah
Join This Month's Art Challenge!
For April's theme, last month's winner has chosen "Microadventure", with the optional challenge of using a gamut mask. What might the world outside your door look like if you were one inch tall? Little things you take for granted may no longer seem so small!
Featured Artwork
This month's featured forum artwork, as voted in the Best of Krita-Artists - February/March 2026:
Working Late at Night (Pikat fanart) by RaitzInk
Happy Dancing Girl by YaMuuS
Gato al aire libre. (Wet paint) by Syn27
Digital Collage Artist Using Krita by Deleted_Designs
Hornet! by desenhunos
Nominate and Vote For Next Month's Featured Artwork!
Participate in next month's nominations and voting to voice your opinion on the Best of Krita-Artists - March/April 2026.
Krita is Free - But You Can Contribute!
Krita is free to use and modify, but it can only exist with the contributions of the community. A small sponsored team alongside volunteer programmers, artists, writers, testers, translators, and more from across the world keep development going.
If this software has value to you, consider donating to the Krita Development Fund. Or Get Involved and put your skills to use making Krita and its community better!
Additional Changes
Krita Plus (Stable, 5.3.2/6.0.2 prealpha):
- Usability: Allow pasting images on the welcome page. (change by Luna Lovecraft)
- Transform Tool: Make increase/decrease brush size actions work with Liquify. (change by Carsten Hartenfels)
- Text Tool: Fix crash when activating Text Tool after opening two views on a document and closing the first one. (bug; change by Gregg Jansen van Vuren)
- Text Tool: Select the text that's created on a new vector layer when the selected layer was raster. (bug; change by Luna Lovecraft)
- General: Fix brushstrokes briefly freezing in images with large empty areas, by using coarse thumbnails for the Undo History docker. (change by Dmitry Kazakov)
- Brush Engines: Fix random texture offsets being reset to 0 on every stroke. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
- Canvas: Fix part of the canvas appearing transparent after cropping the image. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
- File Formats: KRA: Fix importing .kra as layers reversing the layer order. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
- Animation Timeline Docker: Select the given layer when selecting a frame. (change by Luna Lovecraft)
- Animation Rendering: Error out if duplicating a frame fails when rendering frames. (change by Raidon Chrome)
- Android: Prevent "Application not responding" message on startup by copying assets out of the APK later. (change by Carsten Hartenfels)
- G'MIC: Fix using a G'MIC filter causing parentheses in layer names to be converted to control characters. Files with these messed-up layer names are unloadable by Krita 6. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
- Qt6: Text Properties Docker: Fix clicking on fonts in the fonts dropdown doing nothing. (bug; change by Wolthera van Hövell)
- Qt6: Text Properties Docker: Fix using tags. (change by Wolthera van Hövell)
- Python Plugins: Show an error when trying to import the wrong version of PyQt, rather than trying to remove it from Python's path. (bug; change by Freya Lupen)
Krita Next (Unstable, 5.4.0/6.1.0-prealpha):
- G'MIC: Update to version 3.7.4.1. (change by Ivan Yossi)
- Layer Stack: Fix unnecessary updating of a layer mask when merging two layers below it. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
- Text Properties Docker: Fix popups such as the font dropdown to not be cropped to the containing widget. (change by Wolthera van Hövell)
Nightly Builds
These pre-release versions of Krita are built every day.
Note that there are currently no Qt6 builds for Android.
Get the latest bugfixes in Stable Krita Plus (5.3.2/6.0.2 prealpha): Linux Qt6 Qt5 — Windows Qt6 Qt5 — macOS Qt6 Qt5 — Android arm64 Qt5 – Android arm32 Qt5 – Android x86_64 Qt5
Or test out the latest Experimental features in Krita Next (5.4.0/6.1.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux Qt6 Qt5 — Windows Qt6 Qt5 — macOS Qt6 Qt5 — Android arm64 Qt5 – Android arm32 Qt5 – Android x86_64 Qt5