This came up on IRC yesterday. Most people know krita's startup page with the templates for rgb, cmyk and gray in various weird sizes. And the comics templates. Not many people know that it's really easy to make your own set of templates.

This little tutorial shows how to create a template for a character sheet with some fixed elements so you can deliver character sheets in one style for a project. You might find the tutorial simplistic... If so, feel free to skip to the last screenshot

First, let's find a nice background texture.

Press "alt-f2", type "gg:paper textures", press Enter... (For the KDE users among us)



http://www.flickr.com/photos/jinterwas/4722197928/sizes/o/in/photostream/

This is a nice, big texture, a bit original, with the rights to share, remix and make commercial use, as long as we attribute it. No problem then.



Let's open it in Krita. It's a bit big at 5184x3456, but Krita doesn't care as long as you've got the memory.



Then add the layers we like to use. Cribbing from various other tutorials, I add: rough, sketch, painting, color, highlight, shadows. Let's also lock the background layer. Make sure the various layers have the right blending modes and opacity setup.



Then let's add a text layer and set the default paragraph style to something nice.



(Don't mind the weird font preview -- that is another Qt 4.8 bug. Sigh.)

With the Stroke and Fill docker and the Stroke Properties docker, we can add a border.



Looks like everything is setup -- we select the Sketch layer since that's where we want to start, usually, and Krita 2.5 remembers that...

Now we add document information to attribute the background to Jinterwas.



And finally the trick:

In Krita, go to the file menu and select "Create Template from Image"



The following dialog pops up:



You can create a new group (for instance for templates for a project, but you're totally free in your organization) with the Add Group button. Give your template a name and decide whether or not you want Krita always load this template on startup. If so, press the "Use the new template as default" checkbox.

If you don't, when you start Krita you'll see the new group with your new template:

I see how this could come in handy in some cases.

I've removed the old rgb, gray and cmyk templates. That functionality is now in custom image, with the different sizes/dpi presets in the combobox. But I would really like to include several sets of useful templates, so please start making templates! Link to them here, and I'll include them in Krita.

Interesting tutorial, good work.

"With the Stroke and Fill docker and the Stroke Properties docker, we can add a border."

Hoho! I've learned something here