A calm first week in Krita for complete beginners

Krita has a reputation for being free, powerful and slightly intimidating. All three are fair. The first time you open it you meet a toolbox, several panels, a strip of brush icons and a menu bar with more entries than a train timetable. I like to open every one of those menus before I decide what a program is good for, but I would not recommend doing that on your first evening. A week works better. Here is the week I would give a friend: one small job per day, with the things that usually trip people up marked along the way.

Some context first. Krita is an open-source painting program, developed by a volunteer community with the Krita Foundation behind it, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It is built for painting and drawing: brushes, layers, color. It is not a photo editor that happens to have brushes, and it is not a vector illustration tool. Keep that in mind and most of its design choices start to make sense.

If you do not have a tablet yet, read how to choose your first drawing tablet before anything else. You can follow this week with a mouse, but pressure is half the fun.

Before day one: install in the right order

Get Krita from the official site, krita.org, rather than a download mirror. Then install your tablet driver from the tablet maker's support page, restart if the installer asks, and only then open Krita.

Make a new file, pick any round brush and draw one line while pressing harder toward the end. If the line gets thicker, you are ready. If it stays the same width, jump to day six now. There is no point learning brushes on a pen that reports no pressure.

Day 1: The workspace, and how to put it back

When you choose File > New, Krita shows a dialog with templates and a custom document tab. For practice, set the width to about 3,000 pixels and the height to about 2,000. That is big enough to zoom into and small enough that brushes stay responsive on modest computers. Leave the resolution field alone for now; it only matters for print.

The default screen has four areas worth naming:

• The toolbox on the left: freehand brush, shapes, selections, fill, transform and the rest.
• The dockers on the right. "Docker" is Krita's word for a panel. By default you get a color selector, the layers docker and the brush presets docker.
• The tool options, which hold settings for whichever tool is active. Depending on your settings they appear as a docker or behind a toolbar button.
• The top toolbar, with blending mode, opacity, brush size and a button that opens the brush preset chooser.

Today's only job is to break the layout and repair it. Close a docker with its small x button. Then get it back from Settings > Dockers, which lists every docker Krita has. Next, find the workspace chooser, a small icon at the far right of the toolbar that is also listed in the Window menu in recent versions. Pick a different workspace, admire how strange it looks, then switch back to the default one.

Finally, press Tab. Everything vanishes except the canvas. This is canvas-only mode, and it is the single most common reason beginners think Krita has crashed. Press Tab again and your interface comes back. Now you know.

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Day 2: Brush presets, and resisting most of them

Krita ships with a large set of brush presets sorted under tags, with groups for things like inking, sketching, painting and erasing. You will be tempted to try all of them. Try about ten, then choose five:

1. A pencil for loose sketching.
2. An ink pen with a crisp edge.
3. A soft round brush for gentle shading.
4. A textured paint brush for blocking in color.
5. An eraser.

The worked example for today is a test sheet. Divide the canvas into five rows. In each row, with one brush, draw a light stroke, a heavy stroke, a stroke that goes from light to heavy, a small patch of hatching and a scribbled filled area. Five rows, five marks each, about 15 minutes. When you are done you will know more about those five brushes than an hour of clicking through presets would teach you.

Press F5 to open the brush editor and look at what makes a brush behave as it does: the brush engine, the brush tip, and the curves that link size or opacity to pen pressure. You do not need to change anything yet. Just notice that each preset is a bundle of settings, not a mystery.

Two traps here. First, when you change the size or opacity of a preset, recent versions keep those tweaks for the session by default, so a brush can feel different from how it felt yesterday. The brush editor has a button to reload the original preset. Second, pressing E toggles eraser mode for whatever brush you are holding. If your brush suddenly removes paint instead of adding it, press E again.

Resize the brush by holding Shift and dragging left or right on the canvas. Once that becomes a habit, you will stop reaching for the size slider.

Day 3: The pop-up palette

Right-click on the canvas and a ring appears under your cursor. This is the pop-up palette, and it is one of Krita's best features. The ring holds your favorite brush presets, the middle holds a color selector, and nearby are your recently used colors. In recent versions it also carries controls for rotating, zooming and mirroring the view.

Most tablet drivers map the pen's lower side button to right-click out of the box, so you can summon the ring without touching the keyboard. If yours does something else, change it in the driver settings to a right-click.

The brushes in the ring come from a single tag, normally the favorites tag. To put your five brushes from day two into it, right-click each preset in the brush presets docker and assign the tag. The number of slots in the ring can be changed in Krita's settings if five or ten does not suit you.

Today's job: paint a quick study of a mug on a table using only the pop-up palette. No dockers, no menus. Pick colors from the middle, switch brushes from the ring, and only use the keyboard for undo (Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on a Mac).

Day 4: Layers, kept simple

Krita has many layer types: paint layers, group layers, vector layers, fill layers, filter layers, clone layers and file layers. For this week, use only paint layers and groups. The others are useful later and confusing now.

Press Insert to add a new paint layer, or use the plus button at the bottom of the layers docker. Then set up a stack like this, bottom to top:

Layer	What goes on it	Opacity
Background	Flat paper color	100%
Colors (group)	Flat color shapes, one layer each	100%
Shading	Darker tones over the colors	100%
Lines	Final line work	100%
Sketch	Your rough drawing	about 30%

Two layer properties are worth learning today. Alpha lock (the checkerboard icon next to each layer) stops you painting outside existing pixels on that layer, which is perfect for shading inside a flat color shape. Inherit alpha does something similar using the layers below it inside a group; it is the closest thing Krita has to the clipping masks people know from other programs.

Name your layers. Future you will be grateful.

Day 5: Saving, and the difference between .kra and everything else

Krita's own format is .kra. It keeps every layer, group, mask and setting. Treat the .kra file as the master copy of every painting.

PNG and JPG are exports. They flatten everything into one image, which is what you want for sharing and what you do not want for further work. Use File > Export to make those copies, so the document you are working on stays linked to the .kra file and you do not accidentally keep painting in a flattened PNG.

A naming habit that has saved me a lot of grief:

• mug-study.kra is the master.
• File > Incremental Save creates numbered versions such as mug-study_001.kra and mug-study_002.kra, handy before any risky change.
• mug-study-web.png is the export for sharing, sized to about 1,600 pixels on the long side.

PNG keeps hard edges and transparency; JPG files are smaller but lose a little detail each time they are saved and cannot hold transparency. For print, ask the print shop what format it wants before you export anything.

Also open the file handling part of Krita's general settings and look at the autosave interval. Set it to something you can live with, so a crash costs you minutes rather than an evening.

Day 6: Tablet quirks, mostly on Windows

Most pen trouble in Krita comes from the connection between the driver and the program, not from Krita itself. Open Settings > Configure Krita and find the tablet settings page.

On Windows you will see a choice of tablet input API: WinTab or Windows Ink (it may be labeled with the Windows pointer input name). If pressure does not work, or strokes start late, switch to the other option and restart Krita. Then make sure your tablet driver agrees. Wacom's driver has a "Use Windows Ink" checkbox, and Huion and XP-Pen drivers have their own Windows Ink toggles. Mismatched settings are the classic cause of a pen that moves the cursor but draws with no pressure.

The same settings page holds a global pressure curve, and recent versions include a tablet tester that shows what the pen is reporting. Leave the curve linear this week; it deserves its own lesson once your hand has settled.

A few other fixes worth knowing:

• If you see little ripple circles when you hold the pen still, Windows is treating a long press as a right-click. Turn off press and hold in the Windows pen settings.
• If you use two monitors and your strokes look stretched, the tablet is mapped across both screens. Map it to one display in the driver.
• On macOS, tablet drivers usually need accessibility and input monitoring permissions in System Settings. After a system update, check that those permissions are still on.
• Map the pen's upper button to middle-click if you like. In Krita, dragging with the middle button pans the canvas.

If you are working on a screenless tablet such as a small pen tablet, mapping matters even more, because the active area has to match your screen's shape for circles to stay round.

Day 7: Finish one small painting

Use everything from the week on a single piece, about an hour long. Start a new 3,000 by 2,000 pixel file and paint something simple from life: a piece of fruit, a shoe, a houseplant.

1. Sketch on a low-opacity layer with your pencil brush.
2. Block in flat colors on separate layers inside a group.
3. Turn on alpha lock and shade inside the flats with the soft brush.
4. Add a few lines on top with the ink pen, only where they help.
5. Save the .kra, then export a PNG for sharing.

Do all brush and color switching through the pop-up palette. When you are finished, compare the painting with the test sheet from day two. The brushes that felt odd then will feel like tools now.

What to leave for week two

Plenty of Krita can wait: the animation timeline, the drawing assistants for perspective, vector layers, filter layers, wrap-around mode for repeating textures and the scripting tools. All of them are documented in the official Krita manual, which is worth bookmarking because it is thorough and written for artists. If you are coming from an iPad, our guide to Procreate brush basics shows how brush thinking carries across between the two programs, and the apps and software section collects the rest.

One last habit from the week deserves to stay: when something in Krita behaves strangely, check eraser mode, canvas-only mode and the tablet input setting first. Those three explain most of the strange afternoons.