Krita | Open Source & Free Painting Program

Krita Free Animation Software

Open Source Free Painting Program For 2D Animations

Krita is a free and open source 2D animation software application. It allows professional and beginner artists to create stunning digital visuals.

Overview

Having the right tools to improve and enhance your digital animation workflow can make a huge difference in the quality and quantity of visuals you can create. Krita is an open source and free painting program that lets artists create 2D animations whether they are just starting out their careers or are professional animators.

One of the key features of Krita is its cross-device and cross platform compatibility, as it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS and you can also install it on your Android device. Similarly, there is a Chrome browser extension available for Krita through which animators can start 2D painting. Whether you are a concept artist, VFX engineer, illustrator or any other digital artist, Krita can be used to carry out many different forms of digital animations and illustrations.

As an open source digital painting app, Krita has a modern and easy to use interface that provides the necessary tools, effects, color management scheme, and more to control different factors while designing a sketch. The brushes in Krita come well designed and you have the option to opt for advanced settings of brushes for different effects.

System Requirements

While installing Krita for Ubuntu make sure you have the following system requirements:

  • Ubuntu
  • A non-root user with sudo permissions

Features

Here are some good to know features about this open source animation software:

  • Krita’s animation tools are designed for frame to frame raster animation with realtime animation playback controls to edit and review animations.
  • If you require assistance as a new animator, Krita also provides drawing assistants that help with drawing straight lines, vanishing points, drawing ellipses, and other outlines as well. There are more than 9 different drawing assistants to choose from.
  • Onion skinning is a useful animation technique to edit cartoons or sketches frame by frame, in sequence for better understanding of which frames need changes. Krita provides customizable onion skinning that reduces the effort and time put in using traditional animation techniques.
  • Krita provides animators and digital painters with more than 100 brushes to choose from so that each animation that you create has a unique effect and is true to your vision.
  • Painting on a canvas is different as compared digitally painting, and while mastering a brush through a peripheral device may take time, Krita provides the ability to stabilize brush strokes for smooth, straight, curved lines. There is even a dedicated Dynamic Brush tool that aids in this particular issue.
  • With built in vector tools you can also add texts on your animations through Krita. It uses SVG to manage the vector formatted outputs.
  • As an open source painting animation software, not only can you import brush and texture packages created by Krita users, but you can also use the source code to create your own and share them with everyone as well.

Installation

  • Install Krita with a Snap
$ sudo snap install krita
  • To install Krita using your PPA repository, you will first need to add Krita to your system, which can be done by running the following command:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kritalime/ppa
  • Open terminal and update your local server’s package index by typing following command:
sudo apt update
  • Run following command in terminal to install Krita:
$ sudo snap install krita

Explore

In this article we have discussed Krita’s overview and features that makes it one of the best free painting program. To learn about other best free animation software, please check following pages:

 English