Hey all,

I'm an artist and open source advocate. I've been painting in GIMP for years, and every once in a while I've poked in on Krita and for lack of vision on my part or lack of polish on Krita's part, I've not considered using it. Until now. I recently checked in on it, and I'm absolutely blown away by the stability, the feature set and speed of development. I'm not sure if this is an undesired comparison, but it feels to me a lot more like the blender foundation; a vibrant, active, responsive community that wants to compete with proprietary software and I'm very seriously considering switching over entirely for all or most of my work.

That being said, (and this feels selfish considering all the painting tools that Krita has that I haven't had access to but...), what is the eta on the dual brush? Are there experimental builds with it? I feel like the dual brush is the last piece of the puzzle for me that will make Krita's brush system feel complete.

Check out my art at http://www.freeforall.cc, it's all creative commons (and soon there will likely be some stuff done in Krita). I hope to poke around more and try and get involved.

I'm working on the dual brush... We call it stacked brush, because, why limit it to two brushes? The gui is ready, and I've been able to paint with several brushes at the same time already, but the result isn't correct yet, right now it's as if you're paint the same line with two or more brushes on top of each other, and there should be masking and stuff. I might even be on the wrong track by trying to stack brush presets, instead of just brush tips

Awesome! I'm really glad to hear it's actively being developed. I think it would be a huge boon to an already impressive brush engine(s). I like the idea of being able to stack presets as I can imagine a great deal of versatility in brush making would arise, though I can also imagine it makes it a deal more complex to code. If there's anything non-developers can do to help, I'd love to know how. I'm keen to see this feature added to the app. I'll try to get more involved in the community around here and post artwork I make with Krita.

If I am to understand, does it basically just take whatever the stacked brush(es) would make as a mark and apply that as an alpha mask to the original brush? Because that seems to be what photoshop does. Thought it seems photoshop makes a big mask and uses it for each mark.

Well, that's what I'm trying to define. Krita has brush engines that do more than simple make marks (dabs is the technical term) from brush tips along a line, so just overlaying the dabs doesn't work. I'm trying to figure out interesting ways to combine the brush strokes, with blending modes, masking, jitter and so on. But I can only continue on the project after we release 3.0, we need to get Krita stable first! So much changed with the port to Qt5!

Ah so I'm sensing I'll have to be a bit patient for this feature? Ah well. I'm really grateful to the Krita dev team. I'm so excited to see how far it has come, and how good it is now.

Yes -- first we're going to get 3.0 reasonably stable, then it's back to the mines -- er, features for us!