Krita is a free, open-source painting application that’s become a serious alternative to Procreate and Photoshop for digital artists — not a stripped-down free tool, but software built from the ground up specifically for painting, with brush engines and canvas behavior tuned for that purpose rather than adapted from general-purpose graphic design software.
Watch: Krita 4 Tutorial #1 Getting Started (Age of Asparagus, YouTube)
Step 1: Set up your canvas and workspace
On first launch, Krita opens with a fairly dense default interface — dockers for layers, brush presets, and color selection surround the canvas. Start by opening Settings > Window Layout > Painting (or a similar painting-focused preset), which hides tools you won’t need on day one and keeps the brush preset picker and layers panel front and center. Krita’s default workspaces are genuinely customizable, but customizing before you’ve painted anything is a good way to spend an hour without producing art — start with a preset layout and adjust later once you know what you actually reach for.
Step 2: Understand the brush engine, don’t just pick a brush
Krita’s biggest strength — and its biggest source of early overwhelm — is its brush engine. Rather than a fixed brush library, Krita brushes are built from combinable properties (shape, texture, blending mode, pressure sensitivity curves). For a first session, ignore that entirely and use the built-in presets under the Basic and Sketch categories — a round basic brush and a pencil-style sketch brush cover the vast majority of early painting needs. Come back to the engine itself once you have a specific effect in mind that the presets don’t cover.
Step 3: Layers work like you’d expect, with one Krita-specific trick
Layer basics (opacity, blend modes, grouping) work the way they do in any layer-based painting tool. The Krita-specific move worth learning early is clipping a layer to the one below it — right-click a layer and enable “Clip to layer below,” which constrains anything painted on that layer to the shape of the layer underneath. This is the standard technique for painting shading and highlights without leaving your linework, since you can paint freely on the clipped layer without worrying about staying inside the lines.
Step 4: Save early, save often, in Krita’s native format
Save working files as .kra (Krita’s native format), which preserves layers, blend modes, and brush settings — export to PNG or JPG only for a final flattened image. Krita autosaves periodically, but that’s a safety net, not a substitute for manual saves, especially before trying an experimental technique you might want to undo entirely rather than just step back through.