Okay, so this may or may not be a simple question but allow me to explain. I'm very familiar with PS and such, went to art school majoring in illustration. That's where I became accustomed to using a computer/tablet interface for drawing and such using PS, Illustrator, etc. Well now I'm out of art school and I no longer have access to such programs (Subscription based? PSH NO THANK YOU). Anywho. I began my new job as a tattoo apprentice and I've been experimenting with different drawing programs from all over the net and Krita is by far the best so far. However, that goes into my question.

I draw on multiple layers and I understand how to merge down and flatten a image, but when I draw, I draw in different colors to separate line art, details, etc. My question is, how can I convert my colorful mess to just black and white? Please help!

You can probably just use desaturate filter layer on top of everything but it might not be the most elegant solution.

Pure black and white is hardish -- grayscale is easier, merge everything down and apply the desaturate filter, or convert the whole image to grayscale. To go from there to pure black and white isn't a solved problem, I've seen various filters that would apply dithering or thresholding, but none do a really good job.

Btw, in krita you can use layers of various colorspaces. You can do your line art in 16 bit/channel grayscale and the colors in 8 bits/channel rgb in the same image.

Hi akiragale,

the answer to your question depends upon how you draw and what is your layer arrangement,

If you draw on separate layer ( other than background layer) with only line-art then you can lock the alpha( click on the checkered icon in the layer stack to lock alpha) and quickly fill black ( press 'D' to change foreground color to black and then press 'Shift + Backspace to fill) to make the lineart black.

If you draw on the back ground layer or have lineart merged to background layer then de-saturate, converting image to greyscale and back to rgb are your options.

If you tend to draw line art in blue or red color and have some other color for final lineart , and just intend to clean the blue lines from the lineart then you need to look at this tutorial by David Revoy : here.

i hope it helps