I'm a complete beginner with Krita and digital painting.
I am using Krita 4.1.7.101 on Devuan linux (beowulf) on an intel AMD64 processor..
I'm trying to use the smudge brush engine to blend nearby colours on the canvas, so that one blends smoothly into the other instead of having a sharp division between them.
But I'm lost in the menu system.
I've found a panel that lets me select the smudge brush engine, and then set the parameters (though I have no idea what to set them to so they are effective with reasonable painting effort).
But how do I choose to *use* the resulting brush? (I think I did it once, but have no idea how)
And how should I switch back to the regular brush?

hendrikboom wrote:I'm a complete beginner with Krita and digital painting.
I am using Krita 4.1.7.101 on Devuan linux (beowulf) on an intel AMD64 processor..
I'm trying to use the smudge brush engine to blend nearby colours on the canvas, so that one blends smoothly into the other instead of having a sharp division between them.
But I'm lost in the menu system.
I've found a panel that lets me select the smudge brush engine, and then set the parameters (though I have no idea what to set them to so they are effective with reasonable painting effort).
But how do I choose to *use* the resulting brush? (I think I did it once, but have no idea how)
And how should I switch back to the regular brush?

Did you find the default Krita brushes? Blenders are included and all the default brushes are very good in Krita.

I'd start trying these first so you don't reinvent something already in especially if you don't know where is left and right.

In default UI you should see Brush presets docker with lots of brushes. If you don't check at the top Settings -> Dockers - > Brush Presets if it's not ticked then tick it and enjoy the brushes.

If you are creating a new brush or adjusting existing if you hit F5 you open the brush menu where you can also select new brushes as well as tweak your current brush and the right top corner there is save new brush preset to save your newly created/adjusted brush so you cna get back ot it later (it will be somewhere in brush presets - name it well and give it an icon so you can tell right away ).

Check here: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/l ... ushes.html

After you save it you can pick anybrush from brush presets docker (f5 menu has an arrow on the left side if you open it you get the same options as brush presets but that's cumbersome for regular use so just use the docker).

Using them is picking freehand brush tool selecting your brush preset from the brush presets docker and well start painting.

PS: More about brush engines in Krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_man ... gines.html

You probably got 4.1.7.101 from the Devuan repository. This is a very old version and this is the problem with distribution repositories.

The latest formal release is 4.2.6 and is available here: https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/
It has many bug fixes and improvements over the 4.1.7 version.

You can download the 64-bit appimage, give it executable permissions and run that instead of your 4.1.7 installation. Any settings changes you've made and any customisations will be maintained because of the way that krita organises and stores its configuration files and resources.

I'd recommend that when you have 4.2.6 running that you uninstall the 4.1.7.101 version and its associated packages.

You'll need to also download the gmic-qt plugin appimage and set up a reference to that in the krita settings if you want to use the GMIC filters. This is all quite easy and, like everything else, is explained in the manual as is linked to in the reply by viktorsl above.

If you have any problems or uncertainty then you can come here to ask for advice.