Zity - Tile Art

This week's post isn't going to be about Zity but rather about a free art program I recently discovered and will be using for Zity (unless I hire an artist of course).

Krita

There's a lot you can find out about Krita on their website here, but I'll give you an overview.

Krita is a free digital painting program. You can think of it like photoshop with more of a focus on painting and less focus on photos, and of course it's free. Krita uses a complex brush engine system that is very flexible and allows you to create the kind of brush you need. It also works with layers, color pallets, shape tools, gradients, and pretty much anything else you could want. Krita is also consistently updated with bugfixes and new features so there are no worries of using an outdated, glitchy program. It's basically wonderful and anyone interested in doing digital painting/art should seriously check it out.


I picked up Krita while searching for a program to help me with doing tile art. I had previously done my art in Photoshop CS5.5 but there was always one thing Photoshop really lacked and that was a way to preview how tiles looked when... well... tiled. It was a painful process of copying the image over and over again, or using smart objects, or just guessing how the tiles would look in photoshop.

I checked out a few programs like PyxelEdit and Aesprite but stumbled across Krita on a forum. When I saw it's feature list I saw that it supported tiling images and even editing the tiled images. So instead of editing a single tile and previewing it, I could have that image tiled across the screen and edit the by drawing anywhere on the tiled preview. It works almost perfectly and now I can make sure my tiles look good, and change them if need be, without doing any extra effort.

Since programs like Photoshop are getting quite expensive these days (or subscription) Krita is an amazing solution. It's flexible, full-featured, and smooth. The only issues I have with Krita have to do with my own hardware. It runs a little slow when using large or complicated brushes and the lag can be annoying at times but on a better system than my four-year-old laptop it should run smooth.