10 years of using Krita

February 27, 2026

Kiki wearing a white jacket and a petal-shaped skirt, holding a color picker like a paint pallete and drawing a rainbow swoosh around her. The background has faded and cropped versions of the art featured in this article.

2025 marked 10 years since I started using Krita as my main art software. I've tried several since, but always ended up bouncing back to Krita in the long run.

For those new, Krita is a powerful, free and open source illustration program. It's heavily tweakable from the layout, the brush settings, and plugin support. And is also feature packed; there's still things I'm learning the program can do.

I think it's safe to say I'll be using for the long term at this point, so I'd like to make a special art summary featuring some of my favorite works I've done with the progam and talk more about my Krita journey.

2015 - Zinnia Gardner

blue striped zebra on a green background with white color splotches on it. She has curvier colorful lines and a fluff of hair on her chest

The first illustration I finished in Krita. This was of my at the time LPS mascot, Zinnia, who got as a mail order pet a few days prior. At the time I was leaning on more curves, effects, and 'flowy' for my artstyle. I've gotten more angular and flatter since then. Interesting to look back on.

I wonder if younger me could've imagined how much of a load-bearing wall this program would be for me.

2016 - The Garden (scrapped comic)

Comic page featuring a group of teens walking in an overgrown ruin. The door slams behind them, one of the party members says they have a bad feeling about this and that they should go back.

My first attempt at a comic, fully digital using Krita. It was way too much for highschooler me & never made it past the first few pages. The story followed a group of highschoolers who got lost in a mysterious place called 'The Garden', and journey to end to unlock the way out with the help of someone they met at the beginning. Very much inspired by Undertale.

A shorter version was made & finished as a school project that was greatly simplified (to fit the prompt of "write a childrens book"). But I'm unsure if this was ever archvied. The art files still exist, but I imagine this version got lost when my high school email got purged.

2017 - lost contact

a patapon uberhero with 3 eyes and a glitched mask falling in a dark-purple glitch cyberspace

This year I experimented with more glitch-y aesthetics. I liked to run some of my older pics through image corrupters and use them as piece assets.

This OC is Errorface, who's a Patapon OC who's technically not in-universe, but a result corrupted PSP data. A combination of my biggest interests that year.

2018 - considerations.bin

A monitor-headed android with a purple ponytail, white screen with blue eyes & long eyelashes, holographic trench coat, and purple boots, sitting on an abstract background and looking into the distance

2018 was when I created one of my favorite OCs, Prisma. It's hard to describe, but I think this was a turning point for me.

She started off as a Pop'n Music OC, though in modern times she's a resident of my OC universe, Doverhill.

2019 - that's me somehooooow

Monitor headed android and a human version of her below, surrounded by eyes. The monitor-head is holding a cable from her severed hand and the human is holding one below her. She's wearing half a trench-coat and half the legiana armor set from MHW

2019 was a pretty experimental and stylistically inconsistent year for me artwise? This one's a surreal piece featuring Prisma and Monster Hunter Prisma, plus some surreal eye-horror-ish robot stuff. I honestly don't remember where I was going with this.

2020 - Zukin Party!

Contribution for BEMANI fanzine, and the first time I participated in a Zine in general! Between 2018 to early 2020 I was a DDR main (I no longer play for health-related reasons unfortunately). Zukins haven't been featuered in game for years at this point, but I miss them and hope they at least get acknowledged again someday.

2021 - DIFFICULT SITUATION

Two armored androids infront of a building with flame-like shapes in the distance. The one in front has aqua cable hair and arms and is defending the one in the back, who has pink hair and plane wings on her back

Based on a scrapped project of mine, Magia Mechanica. I have an article on it over here (Magia Mechanica - thoughts on a scrapped project). I had a major mixed-digital phase this year since I found I'm more comfortable doing lineart traditionally than digitally, but I still used Krita for coloring. It was a very experimental year overall.

2022 - Lan Party!

A lan party in a dark basement. Jade and Jpeg are in the foreground, with jade holding a controller infront of her laptop and glaring at Jpeg, who's on a desktop and is smirking at them. Iri is looking over at Jade in concern, Moog is laughing at the rivalry, Midi is glaring at Moog with a dissaproving glare. Risa is ductaped to the ceiling.

This is currently one of my favorite works I've drawn. A full illustration based off my yearning to go to a lan-party, where I drew several of my favorite OCs at the time at one with multiple small gags slipped in (I've always wanted to draw a tribute to the duct-tape lan party pic).

2022 is my favorite year in terms of my art in general, there's this 'edge' and sense of enthusiasm that got lost over the years, and I feel this one captures my enthusiasm for my projects at the time well. I also don't do too many fully-digital full illustrations due to struggles with digital lineart, so I think it's great that I managed to pull through for this one.

2023 - PC-mania!

Jade and Iri running in cyberspace with a computer and computer peripherals

Four panel comic page. Panel 1 - Jade retreats from her laptop with water spilt on it and Iri looks in horror. Panel 2 - the computer explodes with a bang, sending room clutter flying while Jade and Iri sheild themselves from the blast. Panel 3 is the damage laptop afterwards. Panel 4 has Jade looking embarrased while Iri has a shadowy look on her face

My senior thesis; a comic about Jade and Iri after having destroyed their PC, having to seek out a new one. All of the programs I used in making it were free and open source! The pages are mixed-digital, with the sketching, coloring, and final edits being done in Krita. Vectors were made in Inkscape, and the script was written with Libreoffice and FocusWriter. Print files were arranged with Libreoffice draw. I think the fact this program had carried me through both high school and through college is a testament to how strongly I feel about Krita, and by extension FOSSware as a means to do art, and is the main reason I chose to feature it for 2023. (9:15 slushie's my favorite project of the year, but I like what PC-mania stands for).

Unfortunately, it's been in limbo since I graduated. It got hit with hiatuses, a format change, and it's been put on hold indefinitely as I haven't been in a good mental state to work on comics. You can read what is currently published on Comicfury and Tapas, though keep in mind when I do continue this project I'm likely releasing it as a PDF elsewhere:

Comicfury mirror - Tapas Mirror

2024 - still more to do

Jpeg on the left on a beanbag in a messy room, surrounded by packing material and boxes of stuff that needs to be unpacked. They're stressed out and looking at a box of partially unpacked gaming stuff. Risa is on the right eating a taquito and is uninterested in helping.

Contribution to Window to Worlds 2024, an OC zine. A mixed-digital piece featuring my Jpeg in the middle of unpacking from a big move, and their (uninvited) roomate Risa not providing any help.

Mixed digital is a fun workflow honestly. I use Krita's gradient map tool to make the scanned lineart transparent; After doing any needed cleanup (stitching scans, adjusting color curves, removing stubborn bluelines), Set one end to the color you want your lineart to be (I usually go with black to start), and the other to transparent.

Krita screenshot showing scanned line art of a comic panel and the gradient map editor. The lineart is made transparent with a black to transparent map

2025 - 1 Year into Learning Japanese

Unarmored Io under a kotatsu playing on a 3DS. There's Anki cards scattered around them, a laptop to the side running kubuntu, a TV in the background with a chart pointing downwards, and a Nix doll with sewing supplies on the kotatsu's surface.

2025 was a very rough year for a lot of reasons both personal and world-related. I found some comfort in writing, and the back half of the year had a lot of blog posts as a result. I like drawing spot illustrations for them, and this one was for my 1 year (or 11 months) update into learning Japanese.

Why Krita?

I came across Krita when I was looking for a new drawing program to use. I used GIMP and MyPaint before, but GIMP isn't illustration oriented (Mypaint was phased out later due to bugs and lack of updates. Rip).

As for what drew me to Krita? For starters, it's free. 13 year-old-me couldn't exactly beg my parents for an Adobe license for Christmas (lol). But I remember my first impression was really liking all the brushes and options Krita comes with out of the box, more than most other free drawing programs at the time. It also has a cute mascot, Kiki! Who's featured at the top of this page.

For why I stayed, a large chunk of it is "it's a good program". Over time, Krita had become more stable than when I first used it and gained more features and improvements over the years I've used it (even the infamous text tool is getting improved on for 5.3). And while I generally stick to line-based illustration there's a lot of tools like animation, image processing, texture previews, and a very in-depth brush system. Maybe a large part of it is using it for so long, but I haven't felt a reason to switch, and the few times I've used other programs they never ended up sticking.

I also see Krita being free and open source a major reason I want to stay. There are still (as of posting) good options for proprietary software, but it's hard to ignore how many of them end up leaning into user-hostile practices. Predatory subscription schemes, DRM that locks you out if you loose internet connection, privacy concerns (especially when unwanted AI is forced in). These are things not present in Krita. In large part because of the community and culture around the program. A lot of the development is more artist-focused. And it being licensed under the GPL cements it as a tool meant to stay accessible for hobbyists, students, and professionals. To quote the website;

"Krita’s GNU GPL license guarantees you this freedom. Nobody is ever permitted to take it away, in contrast to trial or "educational" versions of commercial software that will forbid your work in commercial situations."
- Krita.org, license for usage

I think it's safe to say Krita's here to stay in my toolkit. While I'm uncertain about where I'll be or what projects I want to start right now, I think while I'm still online I want to see what I can do in terms of providing tips. Especially for Linux since resources for art on Linux are not common (though keep in mind I'm still learning myself so these should be seen like "a student sharing their notes").

I wouldn't be where I'm at artwise if it wasn't for this program, and I hope Krita continues to be a strong option for me, my peers and future artists alike.

Kiki wearing a white jacket and a petal-shaped skirt, holding a color picker like a paint pallete and drawing a rainbow swoosh around her

Suprisingly, I don't think I've drawn a full illustration of Kiki until this year. As a bonus, I'm releasing this illustration of her & the source file under CC-BY-SA 4.0

Kiki 2026 (Full image and .kra file)

2026-03-08 - some fixes, notably adding a description for 2024. I was tired when I finished this article, so it must've slid under my radar.

If you've made it to the end, thank you for reading. This summary was supposed to go up last year, but due to poor mental health and motivational dips I ended up delaying it until 2026. This is a progam that means a lot to me and my creative journey and I wanted to make sure the summary I wrote for it was an article I'm proud of and happy to look back on.