Krita: pet project to pro tool
For over 10 years, the main driving force behind Krita has been BoudewijnRempt. As well as acting as lead developer and project maintainer, Rempt co-founded KO GmBH – which until 2014 published the paid version of the software, KritaGemini, and provided commercial support to visual effects studios – and has organised the successful recent crowdfunding campaigns run by the Krita Foundation. Below, he tells us how the software has evolved during that time.
I started using Krita because I needed to draw a map for a fantasy novel I was writing. I was already a Linux user, so I started looking around for a Linux application. Gimp isn’t really designed for painting, and MyPaint didn’t exist at the time, but there was this little application in the KDE corner called Krita, but back then, you couldn’t even draw a line with it. I thought I could make it work, so I started learning C++, then started blogging about it. There was a lot of work to be done, but every time I blogged that I couldn’t get something to work someone new would arrive in the project and start coding.
At the start, Krita was more of a generalpurpose image editor. We got so enthusiastic about everything we were doing, we tried to include everything, and that led to a huge amount of half-working code. But Lukáš Tvrdý did his master’s thesis on brush engines for Krita, and we had considerable strength there. So around 2009, we decided that we should focus on painting.
Soon after, David Revoy released a training DVD showing how he created concept art with
Gimp. One of our developers lived near David, so he went to ask him why he wasn’t using
Krita. And he told him: “It’s unusable. It’s slow, it’s inaccurate, and it crashes all the time.” So we set ourselves a goal: let’s make David Revoy happy. We focused on one artist because we knew he was dedicated, and would give feedback.
When we got to Krita2.4 – which was a long release; it took more than a year – David said, “OK, now it’s usable. I could switch and use this full-time.” And ever since 2.4, we’ve really been focusing on making something that artists could use.
Of course, very few artists use Linux exclusively, and we didn’t have Krita on Windows then. But Intel wanted a version for its 2-in-1 laptops, so we got funding for a Windows port.
In terms of reaching out to artists rather than the open-source community, one of the things that really worked well for us was our initial Kickstarter campaign. That created a lot of publicity. Krita has also featured in [leading concept art magazine] ImagineFX recently, and that’s definitely helped.
I’m sometimes really surprised by who uses Krita. We were at [computer graphics trade show] SIGGRAPH in 2014, and people working for big studios told us that they’d used it on movies.
But it’s mostly smaller companies that use the Krita package: usually ones with a dozen to two dozen artists that are mainly working in visual effects. They’re looking to replace
AdobePhotoshop in their workflows because they’re working on Linux [for their 3D software work] and want to get rid of the extra PC sitting in the corner that runs Adobe
Photoshop. Krita gets used for a bit of everything: concept art, matte painting, texturing, and touching up stills.
We now have about 150,000 unique visitors to the website each month, and get 30-50,000 downloads a month. It’s hard to tell exactly, but I think our user base now numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
About half of our income is from crowdfunding; the other half is sales of Krita
Gemini on Steam, commercial subscriptions, one-time donations and sales of training DVDs. We’re getting to the point where we can fund Dmitry’s work [developer Dmitry Kazakov] from our monthly income, but we still can’t fund my work full-time, so I sometimes have to take an extra job.
This year, we’re focusing on overall performance and animation tools, but after that, I want to work on text balloons that work really well for comic books. I get a lot of people who ask if they should use Krita instead of MangaStudio, and that’s another huge market. And in five years, I really want us to be equally good on all four big platforms: as well as Windows and Linux, that means OS X and Android.
But mostly, I want to grow the community so the project can sustain more full-time developers. I think the ideal number of developers would be four or five. That would be enough to surprise the rest of the world with Krita and its features.
My novel still isn’t really finished, by the way. I wrote the end a year ago, and now I’m revising it. And I didn’t draw the map in Krita either. It’s still in pencil and paper.
The digital painting package Krita ( www.krita.org) is one of the great success stories of open-source graphics software. Ten years ago, it was a hobbyists’ coding project – and one “without a single real user”, according to Boudewijn Rempt, the project’s long-term maintainer. Today, it’s a serious alternative to AdobePhotoshop or CorelPainter, with users numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and counting.
One recent convert to the open source package is illustrator Katarzyna Oleska ( www.katarzynaoleska.com), who switched to Krita a year ago. “At the time, I was using commercial software and I didn’t know much about it,” she says. “I was amazed how powerful it was considering it was developed as an open-source, free program.”
Oleska, whose clients include a string of European publishing houses, now uses Krita for her commercial work, including her recent series of cover illustrations for the German editions of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels ( picturedbelow).
Oleska is also writing an eight-part series of tutorials on the software for international concept art magazine, ImagineFX ( www.creativebloq.com/tag/imaginefx).
“Initially, I thought Krita was too complex for me,” says Oleska, who previously used both Photoshop and Painter. “But the truth is that I was just looking for the comfort of a familiar environment. Soon, I noticed that it was in fact very easy to use, and I found a lot of things to love about it.”
One of those things was the brush engine, designed to mimic the experience of painting with real-world media, and widely regarded as one of Krita’s greatest strengths. “I switched from Photoshop to Painter because I was looking for a more natural feel to my brushes, but the controls were temperamental,” says Oleska. “With Krita, I was surprised how much easier controlling brush settings was.”
As well as clever code, Krita has benefited from its developers’ efforts to create a product that appeals to artists as well as open-source enthusiasts, actively canvassing the opinions of working illustrators and modifying the software accordingly. “The changes were subtle, but they did make a difference,” says Oleska. “The organisation of the program and the ways of controlling brushes [both improved] gradually, and I was always happy with the changes.”
So if Krita is both powerful and userfriendly, why do so many professional illustrators still use commercial software? Oleska believes there are two main reasons: one real, and one imaginary. “It’s a very natural reaction to assume that a free product cannot be as good as the one we pay for – even if that’s not true,” she says. “It’s also natural to assume – quite rightly this time – that if we pay for something, we also buy the right to complain about it.”
But while Krita doesn’t offer formal customer support, it does benefit from a large and dedicated user community. “There are a lot of people on the forum and IRC channel who know the program inside out, and who are always happy to help” says Oleska. “Bugs happen, of course, but they usually get fixed quite quickly.”
“I’m very happy with the support I’ve received so far,” confirms Sylvia Ritter ( www.sylvia-ritter.com), a freelance illustrator who produces poster and album artwork in
Krita, and who forms one half of indie game studio Duangle ( www.duangle.com). “The Krita developers are also active on Twitter and Facebook, and they’re eager to create the best open-source painting software in the whole galaxy.”
Ritter, who came to Krita through her involvement in the real-time graphics demoscene, has never used paid-for tools in her professional work, and says that she feels no need to start.
“Many artists seem to believe that commercial software is necessary to be a professional,” she says. “But clients don’t care how [the work] is done, so long as they get what they asked for.”