Krita has actually been in development for a very long time, originally as a general graphic design program, but once it started tightening its focus on painting it began to attract more and more artists and is now one of the most popular applications of its kind. It’s developed as part of the incredible KDE project (who also make an entire operating system, by the way). Krita is an incredibly feature rich, dedicated digital painting application that also happens to be fully free, open source and cross platform.

I’m sure there are other applications out there I haven’t yet encountered though, so if you use a great digital painting program not mentioned here, please do go ahead and let us know in the comments so others can check it out too. There are several applications that can be used for digital painting as a secondary function, like Affinity Photo for example, but we won’t be touching on those here.Īs I mentioned in our series intro, I have personally tried every application in this series in order to fill you in on included features as best I can. And thirdly, they all have digital painting as their number one priority. Secondly, they all provide the option to secure a permanent license. Firstly, they all follow our series theme of being low or no cost–every piece of software in this list is either free or less than $100. This article will stick with applications that check off a few boxes.

In this article we’re moving into another specialized area of Photoshop use, and that is digital painting. In the last entry we went over tools available for those who use Photoshop as a photo manipulation program. Welcome to the second installment in our series exploring the world of creative software that lies beyond the realm of Adobe.

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