Krita

A free digital painting application.

Krita is a digital painting application aimed at illustrators and concept artists, with brush engines that simulate ink, oil, pastel, watercolour, and other natural media. Many of the brushes were developed in collaboration with working illustrators, which gives them an unusual feel of authenticity compared with paint applications that ship default brushes without close artist input.

Beyond raster painting, Krita supports animation (with onion- skinning and a timeline-based workflow), vector layers, seamless texture creation, and a pen-tablet-first input model that makes it usable with Wacom and similar drawing tablets out of the box. The Resources Bundle system lets artists share and download brush sets, palettes, patterns, and templates.

Krita is part of the KDE community and has been continuously developed since around 1999. It hit 1.0 quality at the Krita 2.9 release in 2015 (after a couple of major rewrites) and has been the leading free digital-painting application on Linux, Windows, and macOS ever since. The Krita Foundation funds full- time developers through donations and Steam/Microsoft Store sales, with the source code remaining GPLv3.

Krita screenshot — Screenshot: Tyson Tan and VulcanSphere, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: Graphics

Website: https://krita.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install krita
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install krita
Arch:          sudo pacman -S krita
macOS:         brew install --cask krita

Authors

KDE community and Krita Foundation

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