Digital Painting Academy is worth a subscription! 4) Another tutorial helped me add life to the skin tones, but I can’t find it, RRGH. The following tutorial got me started on the goat, helping me add textures and values without losing my mind: Paintable: Digital Painting Tips & Tricks: How to Achieve a Traditional Look With Texture Brushes If you toggle the alpha transparency on and off, you’ll see all the coloring you did “outside the lines” of the silhouette. Any layers above that in group, normal painting layers with alpha transparency locked (looks like a weird “a” or squiggle). So: bottom layer in group: silhouette with pixel transparency locked. Note how they’re all above the bottommost silhouette layer and that their alpha transparency is locked (squiggle).

Same Clipping Group, but with the other layers visible. After clicking “lock Alpha transparency” in the new layer above the silhouette layer (within the group), I could then paint with soft edged brushes without overstepping the bounds of that silhouette. When I was happy with the shape, I locked the pixel transparency (in the layer stack, it’s the checkerboard to the right of the layer name), then hit CTR+ALT+G to make a Clipping Group. Well, I started with a flat, single-color silhouette to define the character’s borders (and make a strong sihouette!). These hard edges meant I could reuse the character art for other promos, but how were they doing that? Studying that art, I saw a lot of painterly details inside the characters, but the character edges were sharp. I wanted this piece to have a look similar to the ARMELLO game promo art. 2) Keep clean edges on painterly work by using Clipping Groups and making your base layer a plain silhouette. Note: for all of these but the paw I kept the values pretty form-based and plain–most the glowy lighting effects were added at the very end of the process.

The cover file would update and show me if I was on the right path. Using File Layers meant I could also flip back to the full composition and after I saved the changes to the goat.

Adding a transform mask to the file layer helped me get him the right size before I moved him into position. kra file (with the full thumbnail as a guide). Then I watched GDQuest Krita tips: using the File Layer for game art mockups: Īnd realized what I’d been doing wrong the whole time: to resize File Layers, you have to apply a transform mask before using the transform tool.įile layers let me paint goat, details and all, in his own file, then add him (as a File Layer) to the main cover. But I’d heard of Krita’s File Layers and thought maybe they could help me out…except I’d tried them out before and couldn’t figure out how they worked. With a 300DPI workfile at around 16 inches tall and 21 inches wide and a TON of elements planned, I knew it’d be huge and would make my rig chug. I wanted to paint this much larger than the book size it would be printed at in case I wanted to do posters. At the end you’ll see early WIPs, then the full wraparound cover and detail shots.įirst, here’s the image we’re talking about:ġ) Got a big project? Use Krita’s File Layers to work on elements separately before compositing them in the final piece. For all you digital artists out there, here’s some tips plus a list of Krita tutorials that helped me paint my latest fantasy book cover.

Gdquest krita tutorial