Hello,

I've used Krita a looong time ago, briefly. Back then it was barely usable, being still in its very early days. Now I'm back at trying it - it seems to be a great app with lots of drawing-oriented capabilities. More artist-focused than technician-focused, so to say. That I like.

However, I have to admit that I'm somewhat scratching my head after some tests... I planned to use it as a sketching board - pencil-like sketch, nothing fancy. But I believe I didn't really grasp the basic UI ideas - I've no idea on what to do, plain and simple. Here is what I did.

First, I created ab sRGB drawing. No problem there, everything was straight obvious.

Then, since I had made a plain white background layer (the "white paper"), I thought about creating a new layer above it. No problem either, the + button was obvious. I wanted to draw as I'd with a pencil, so I picked a drawing layer, as a shape layer sounded more like vector drawing.

Then, I clicked on the "pencil" button, just below the "arrow" button. So far so good, I leave "Pixel brush", mode "normal", pick my color, and start drawing on the canvas I selected.

That's where my problem started. First, I notice that Krita created automatically a new layer of the "shape" type. Second, it isn't drawing on a "per-coordinate basis", but instead it seems to be making sort of vector curves. What does appear on the screen while I'm holding the pen changes when I put the pen away, just like vector graphics.

Moreover, I seem to have drawn nothing on the layer I had initially created. Now I'm puzzled. But well, that's still ok for a simple sketch anyway, so I keep drawing. But after a couple minutes, drawing each stroke becomes slower and slower, up to a point it becomes unusable.

That's where I stopped and decided to ask for some basic guidance. I found the Krita User Manuel, but TBH I found it very useless - "Painting with Krita" is simply not there, and the layers chapters were too very empty.

At that point, I dropped the gauntlet and made my drawing on another program, but that's indeed very frustrating. I planned to put Krita in use given what it seemed to be able to perform.

So ok, my question will be quite simple: where can I find explanations on Krita basic operations? The references I found were, for the most part, related to the 1.x series, which was definitely different. Also, is that slowness when drawing I experienced expected behavior, and what should I do to solve it?

Finally, ok maybe it sounds very dumb, but how do I draw a simple pencil stroke on an active drawing layer? No Bezier curves or vector lines - just what I'm seeing when holding the pen down stays so when I release it.

I cannot say I had a "bad" experience with Krita, but it was like going in the middle of Hungarian speakers while all I speak is Cantonese XD. So any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

You selected the vector based pencil. The brush is the top left tool in the second group.

Specifically, the tool icon you want to click is this one:



PS The image is taken from my "Tips for new users" post which has a lot of the things that are useful but not obvious to anyone just beginning with Krita. This is the stuff I wish someone told me early on!

I had the same problem the first time that I played with Krita jeje

Kubuntiac wrote:PS The image is taken from my "Tips for new users" post which has a lot of the things that are useful but not obvious to anyone just beginning with Krita. This is the stuff I wish someone told me early on!

Ah, many thanks! Indeed, I had understand it completely the opposite way: since the lower buttons displayed shapes, I thought they were actually the vector ones!

Maybe different icons/a different disposition of the toolbox buttons would make it more obvious... I'm sure that it is a rather common mistake from new users.

Yeah, that's a reasonable assumption. I think we'd really do well to move the paint tools to the top, and maybe change the paint with brushes icon to be something that looks like the vector draw one, but with a paintbrush instead of a pencil...