Hi there,

I just started using Krita and have been having a blast fiddling away with all that the brush engine can do.

I was reading some old developer posts http://pentalis.org/kritablog/?p=157 In it there is mention that making a halftone brush "[is] trivial to create one from the hatching brush" Forgive my ignorance, but I can't seem to make myself a halftone brush using the hatching brush settings.

I have a great deal to learn about the brushes yet, and haven't made my way through all the tutorials yet. However, I would love some help figuring this out!

All I am really looking to do at the moment is make a brush that:

creates a cloned set of boxes or ellipses (or any bit-mapped or vectored object that would be nice!)

the sizes of the boxes/ellipses changes with pen pressure, but their centers remain the same distance from other dots even after scaling in size

if possible can be kept to a strict grid, like can be done with hatching brushes; so even if I let go and brush over the same area again, all that happens is it overlaps the same pixels, changing nothing (assuming I was holding down with the same pressure on the pen)

Are there any ideas on how to do this? I sort of understand how to do the last two parts, from looking at the hatching brushes built into Krita. (Though I don't think some explanation would hurt, despite me feeling I sort of understand) However, I can't figure out how to get part 1 done for the life of me. Should I even be trying to do this with a hatching brush? or should I be trying to do this using something else? (pattern brush?)

Also I was reading that the brush engine is extendable?! Is there a list of plugins somewhere?!

Lastly, I don't fully understand blend modes. If I am not mistaken this isn't something unique to Krita; it is more of an underlying graphics engine function. Is there a resource available that will help me understand what the blend options do?...

I would be very grateful for any feedback!

I see, umm did I ask this in the wrong place? Kind of disappointed to still have gotten no reply

The forums are a little inactive.

Have you tried the particle brush insread of the haltching brush?

Also, David Revoy has an interesting approach to a halftone brush in his Krita v3 brushkit.

Blend modes are a little difficult to explain. Basically, when you layer one colour over the other, there are different ways for thd computer to calculate how the combination of these layered colours look like. The different blendmodes are different methods for the computer to compute the end look of the different colours.

The best way to get to know blend modes is to try them out. I recommend you get two pictures and set them as sperate layers of the same files. Then set the upper one to different blend modes to see their effects. I recommend you try the following ones in this order:

*Multiply
*Screen
*Overlay
*Colour
*Luminosity

These are the most commonly used ones, and should give an instinct of how the rest works

As far as i know there is no brush in krita that can exactly do what you want. There are surely possible settings for halftone brushes, but none of this change the size of the shape they use. The effect is achieved by adding (summing up) color. How the color sums up is defined by the color (blend) mode. The hatching brush is in some way an exception of this. It works with a grid where line width and spacing between the lines is defined and could change by pressure (Thickness Sensor), but you are limited to the possible grid structures, so no circles or ellipses.

With patterns you can achieve effects that simulate this, but this comes from color that sums up and visually looks like the shape is bigger.

Another way might be to use a pixelbrush with a big spacing. If the used shape has no offset you can set the spacing to 1.0 (=100%) or higher so that the shapes do not overlap. To get exact results you can use such a brush with the line tool or with vectors and/or additionally use assistants.

Understanding Blend Modes is not really easy. Experimenting and staying with the most important modes like described above might be the best idea. I have found a tutorial that helped me a lot and additionally is a good reference. It's written for photoshop, but it's just the same in krita and in it covers all important modes. You can find it here: http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?action=tutorial&name=blendmodes